Barbara Kasten. Postabstraction | exhibition

Barbara Kasten. Postabstraction

13.03–7.06.2026
Opening: 12.03 (Thursday), 7:00 PM
Venue: Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw
Curator: Agnieszka Pindera

“Barbara Kasten. Postabstraction” is the first exhibition of this scope of the American artist’s work in this part of Europe — and at the same time a return to a place that years ago helped shape her artistic language. The survey presents 100 works by Barbara Kasten in various media – photography, sculpture and installation – and is complemented by the artist’s intervention in the staircase space of Zachęta.

The exhibition recalls an important stage in the artist’s biography connected with Poland. In the early 1970s Kasten came to Poznań for an internship in the tapestry studio of Magdalena Abakanowicz. Fascinated by the Polish school of artistic textiles — treating fiber as a sculptural medium — she created here a series of sculptures made of sisal. The works later went to Warsaw for an individual presentation at the Gallery of Sculpture. Although these were her last sculptural realizations, the experience of working in Poland proved to be pivotal. It strengthened an approach that still defines the artist’s practice: the image as building relationships between object, space and light. The exhibition at Zachęta shows how this thinking develops from early experiments in the 1970s to contemporary works.

After returning to the United States the artist began to experiment with photography – from photograms and cyanotypes to staged Polaroids. Kasten does not photograph found reality. The subject of her works is not the object — whether studio or architectural — but the relations between its elements: the way light, often saturated with color, refracts and transforms space. In the studio and outdoors she constructs her own setups from mirrors, steel rods, meshes, color filters and simple geometric solids. Using light and reflections she constructs images without digital intervention.

The title “Postabstraction” refers to the dialogue Kasten conducts with the history of the avant‑garde, constructivism and modernist and postmodern architecture. The artist does not repeat the language of abstraction — she rather reworks it, tests it and confronts it with the experience of seeing. She is interested in how geometric forms and luminous constructions function today: in specific interiors, in relation to the surroundings and the audience.

The exhibition at Zachęta does not follow a chronological layout. It proposes moving between themes: sculpture as a starting point, photography as a field of experiment, architecture as a stage for light and space as a medium in itself. The works gathered in the exhibition show Barbara Kasten consistently investigating light, color, structure and the relationships between elements of the image. “Postabstraction” is a survey of six decades of the artist’s work and an invitation to conscious looking — to experiencing a space where light becomes a material and the viewer is part of the composition.

Barbara Kasten was born in 1936 in Chicago. She studied painting at the University of Arizona and the design of sculptural textile forms at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Her mentor was Trude Guermonprez, whose teaching method derived from the Bauhaus. In 1971–1972, as a Fulbright‑Hays fellow, she interned in the studio of sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz at the State Higher School of Fine Arts (now the University of the Arts) in Poznań. In 1982, as part of an artistic exchange between Poland and the United States, she donated the photograph “Konstrukt PC/4B” (1981) to the Museum of Art in Łódź. Her works are in the collections of many museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Tate Modern in London and the Musée National d’Art Moderne and Centre Pompidou in Paris.

More: strona wydarzenia

• Instytucja finansowana przez: Ministerstwo Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego
• Zachętę wspiera: Towarzystwo Zachęty Sztuk Pięknych
• Mecenas Zachęty: Orlen
• Wystawa organizowana we współpracy z: Narodowym Muzeum Sztuki im. M.K. Čiurlionisa w Kownie
• Partnerzy wystawy: AkzoNobel; Sofitel Warsaw Victoria
• Patroni medialni: Pismo; naszemiasto.pl; Polskie Radio
• Partner wernisażu: Kombucha by Laurent