Barbara Kasten at Zacheta Warsaw
Barbara Kasten (1936, born in Chicago) – an influential American contemporary artist – is considered a pioneer of photo-based abstraction. Her work anticipated the look of digital imaging decades before it became common, influencing later generations of artists working with installation, photography, and virtual space.
Barbara Kasten’s work is highly distinctive and difficult to categorize. She creates abstract, geometric compositions using physical materials—like mirrors, glass, wire, and colored light—arranged in staged environments and then photographed.
She combines real objects and lighting effects to create illusions of space, explores how 3D environments translate into 2D images, uses no digital manipulation – effects are created physically in-camera, often described as working with “light, space, and time” as her true materials. Her images can feel almost digital or computer generated, even though they are entirely analog.
There is currently a major exhibition by Barbara Kasten at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art – and it’s one of the key contemporary art shows in Warsaw right now.
Around 100 works: photography, sculpture, installation. Exhibition covers six decades of Kasten’s practice, includes a site-specific intervention in the gallery’s staircase.
The show highlights how Kasten: builds physical constructions (glass, mirrors, colored light), transforms them into abstract photographic images, and blurs boundaries between object, space, and image.
