CHICAGO, IL.- The Graham Foundation, in partnership with the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial, presents Barbara Kasten: Stages, the first major survey of the work of Chicago-based artist Barbara Kasten. Widely known for her photographs, since the 1970s Kasten has developed an expansive practice through the lens of painting, textile, sculpture, theater, architecture, and installation. Organized in conversation with the artist and with full access to her extensive archive, the exhibition offers fresh vantages onto Kasten’s five-decade career as an innovative multidisciplinary artist engaged with abstraction, light, and architectonic space.

Barbara Kasten: Stages situates the artist’s work within current conversations in art and architecture and traces its roots to the unique and provocative intersection of Bauhausinfluenced pedagogy in America, the California Light and Space movement, and the ethos and aesthetics of postmodernism. Kasten’s interest in the interplay between threedimensional and two-dimensional forms, her concern with 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 contemporary architecture’s critical engagement with visual arts practices as well as to a new generation of artists who have drawn inspiration from Kasten’s evolving aesthetic and process.

Loosely chronological, the 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, forays into set design, archival documents, and video documentation, along with Kasten’s best known photographic series—her studio constructions and architectural interventions. In addition, Kasten has created a new site-specific video installation in the Graham Foundation’s historic Madlener House ballroom, which marks a significant development in the artist’s interests in surface and bodily scale in relationship to architectural space.

Barbara Kasten: Stages is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania and is curated by ICA Curator Alex Klein. The Chicago presentation of the exhibition opened to the public on October 1, 2015.

Barbara Kasten (born 1936, Chicago; lives Chicago) trained as a painter and textile artist, receiving her MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) in Oakland in 1970. There she studied with pioneering fiber artist Trude Guermonprez, a former teacher at Black Mountain College and an associate of Anni Albers. In 1971 Kasten received a Fulbright to travel to Poznań, Poland, to work with noted sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz. During the 1980s she embarked on her Constructs series, which incorporates life-size elements such as metal, wire, mesh, and mirrors into installations produced specifically for the camera. Kasten was one of a select group of artists to be invited by Polaroid to use its new large format cameras, and it was with these that she made many of her best known works, her palette becoming bolder in response to the lush, saturated quality of the medium.

In the mid-1980s Kasten stepped out of the studio and began working with large architectural spaces. Institutions such as the High Museum of Art in Atlanta designed by Richard Meier and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles designed by Arata Isozaki, as well as the World Financial Center in New York designed by César Pelli, were eager to showcase their new postmodern buildings via the cinematic lighting, mirrors, and fabrications that were part of her monumental productions. Following her architectural projects she continued working on a large scale, creating dramatic displays in the midst of ancient ruins. In the intervening years she shifted her focus to talismanic objects and artifacts, returning to the cyanotype process she had embraced at the beginning of her career. Her most recent work has taken Kasten back to the studio, exploring a more minimal palette with many of the same materials that shaped her early constructed photographs. Over the years her vocabulary and interests, including her ongoing experimentation with constructions, sets, and installations at the human scale, have provided a through-line and given a unity to her artwork, even as she has experimented with multiple processes, from cyanotypes and Polaroids to Cibachromes and video installations.

Kasten’s photographs of studio constructions and cinematic stagings are included in major museum collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.