London’s Thomas Dane Gallery has staged the very first solo exhibition in the UK of Barbara Kasten, featuring both recent and historic works spanning more that 40 years in the career of the Chicago-based artist.
Kasten’s oeuvre combines sculpture and photography as part of an artistic process that she calls “painting in motion,” which involves carefully assembling installations made of glass, mirrors, acrylic, and metal elements, and then photographing them.
Kasten was trained as a sculptor and painter. But early in her career, influenced by a number of 20th century art movements—including Constructivism, the Bauhaus School, the Light and Space Movement, and Postmodern design—she started capturing her installations in photographs, creating her distinctively painterly and sculptural images, which can be described as “flat sculptures.”
Kasten first rose to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s with her series Construct, in which she transformed building materials into tableaux-like compositions, and then photographed them with a Polaroid camera.
In more recent series, like Transpositions (2014-2016) and Collisions (2016), Kasten has used Plexiglas to create large-scale compositions, almost ghostly in their transparency.
Her experiments with media haven’t ceased, though, and her most recent work, Revolutions (2017), includes a moving image projection, as well as Plexiglas, and photographic paper.
“Barbara Kasten: Intervals” is on view at Thomas Dane Gallery, London, from February 3 – March 25, 2017.