Over a career spanning five decades, Barbara Kasten (b. 1936, United States) has experimented with notions of space, stage and architecture through an ‘interdisciplinary performance’ between photography, sculpture, and painting. In creating her works, she assembles and photographs in her studio installations made of architectural ‘props’, such as glass, mirror, metal, or wood constructions. Space as a stage of changing reality is the central motif of the resulting artworks, with theatrical arrangements notable for their use of colour, light and shadow.
Kasten’s cross-genre practice draws upon several influences, including Modernist architecture, Constructivism, the Light and Space art movement, and the interdisciplinary approach of the Bauhaus School, in particular the work of artist László Moholy-Nagy. With its continued use of analogue photographic materials, her visionary practice has influenced a new generation of contemporary artists amidst today’s prevalence of digital imagery, Photoshop and 3D rendering.
Site Lines, Kasten’s first solo exhibition in a UK public gallery, comprises a new, site-specific commission that responds to the distinctive architectural features of the De La Warr Pavilion’s Grade I listed modernist building. Furthering her interest in the mechanisms and structures of how images are created, she has reconceived the gallery’s windows as a proscenium: a threshold between inside and outside space. Leant up against the glass are a series of coloured, acrylic beams, the forms of which echo the internal and external columns that support the Pavilion’s rectilinear geometries. Installed throughout the gallery – ‘backstage’ behind the proscenium – is a series of stage flats constructed out of metal and mirror. Kasten imagines these as ‘movie screens’ that provide a cinematic experience for visitors across the site through reflection and warping. Combined with stage lighting, these screens create a choreography of colour, light, and shadow throughout the space as its atmosphere changes with the weather outside.
Presented in the context of this new commission is a work from Kasten’s seminal Architectural Sites series (1986-89). Made on location with a single exposure and no digital intervention, this body of work restages the architectural sites of several museums and institutions through bold colours and kaleidoscopic perspectives. As reconfigurations of architectural forms shifting from two to three dimensions, this photographic series speaks to Kasten’s transformation of the gallery this summer, as she invites visitors to enter her theatrical construction and move through modernist form in real time.
