PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania presents Barbara Kasten: Stages, the first major monographic survey of the work of artist Barbara Kasten, February 4–August 16, 2015. Organized in conversation with the artist and with full access to her extensive archive, the exhibition includes approximately eighty works spanning nearly five decades of Kasten’s career–from her early experiments in the 1970s and brightly colored photographic studio constructions of the 1980s to a new site-specific installation. Although Kasten is primarily recognized for her photographs, her expansive practice has developed through the lens of many different disciplines, including sculpture, painting, theater, textile, and installation.

Barbara Kasten: Stages situates Kasten’s work within current conversations around sculpture, abstraction, and photography, tracing its roots to the unique and provocative intersection of Bauhaus-influenced pedagogy in America, the California Light and Space movement, and postmodernism. Kasten’s concern with the interplay between three-dimensional and two-dimensional forms, her interest in staging and the role of the prop, her cross-disciplinary process, and the way she has developed new approaches to abstraction and materiality are all intensely relevant to the present artistic moment. Pushing her work forward, she is constantly folding older concerns into new contexts, as energized by the ideas and innovations of her younger artistic peers as they are by hers.

This exhibition focuses on selections from major bodies of work spanning the 1970s to the present. It brings together and contextualizes for the first time Kasten’s earliest fiber sculptures, mixed media works, cyanotype prints, photographic series, and forays into set design, alongside archival material and select video documentation. In addition, Kasten will create an ambitious new architectural–scale video installation in ICA’s high space that underscores her interests in light, form, and shadow.