Barbara Kasten “Shift”

Bortolami

[Image: Barbara Kasten "Untitled" (1974) folded fiberglass, 64 x 54 x 5 in.]

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Bortolami presents SHIFT, Barbara Kasten’s sixth exhibition with the gallery. Featuring five bodies of work, the show connects her little-known sculptures from the 1970s to her most recent output. Each artwork is tied to her experimentation with fiberglass window screening, a material she began using in the early 1970s and throughout her forty-year career.

Initially trained as a painter in the 1960s, Kasten shifted to textiles in her graduate years in the 1970s studying with renowned fiber artists Trude Guermonprez and Magdalena Abakanowicz. Window screening, a ubiquitous and utilitarian industrially-produced woven material, presented myriad possibilities. Taken by its physical nature and optical effects it produces when lit, Kasten also used the material as a basis to create not only sculptures but also her ethereal cyanotypes in the 1970s, another medium she has revisited intermittently over the last few decades.

Kasten’s Reconstructions are wall-mounted sculptures of folded window screening–Pouf and Diamond are recreations of pre-existing works destroyed in the 1980s, while Lama Glama is an entirely new form. Originally created in 1974, these sculptures sprang from an interest in devising three-dimensional forms from a two-dimensional plane. Kasten utilized her background in textiles to fold, stretch, and pull the material into three-dimensional space with the illusory properties of the material in mind. Illuminating the forms is a crucial step for Kasten, who insists that without light, the Reconstructions remain flat and once lit they transform into volumetric forms, their shadows creating the illusion of moiré. Rather than being mere physical, material objects, their shadows operate as a medium through which viewers can alter their perception of space. Likewise, the four, two-color silkscreens in the small room engage the same imagery. Rendered in bold contrasting colors, the prints point to both the imagery and the screens with which they were made.

The multi-paneled 1977 Photogram Paintings are two from a series of nine. Inspired by a László Moholy-Nagy photogram of crumpled paper, Kasten manipulated silver gelatin mural paper by twisting and tearing the material before arranging window screening and boxes atop its surface and exposing the arrangement to light. She developed the exposed paper in the darkroom, adhering it to untreated canvas stretched over custom-made supports. The artist then applied oil paint in precise lines and careful washes, drawing attention to the printed shadow and geometry, purposefully taking her cues from mid-century painters challenging the traditional notion of the medium by using shaped canvases and unconventional modes of display.

Grids provide an important tool and vehicle for abstraction. In Kasten’s new Shields and Plans, the rigid pattern becomes an undulating moiré or a framing device. The Shields also represent the revitalization in her use of cyanotypes, a medium she returned to in her backyard after her studio’s lockdown in 2020. Beginning with paper as she did in her works from the 1970s, and pivoting to raw linen, chosen for its color and texture, the new cyanotypes point to her early interest in textiles. Using scrap metal grids, Kasten exposed the cyanotype-saturated linen to the sun and affixed a different scale metal grid to the stretched canvases. Once lit, the mesh casts a shadow on the cyanotype, creating a temporary photogram atop a fixed one. The artist’s new Plans consist of studio photographs of intersecting scrap metal printed on raw linen, in which both the print and the support become part of the work’s imagery. Both Plans and Shields represent a material research just as much as an aesthetic or structural one.