Barbara Kasten
Frieze Projects at Frieze Los Angeles
with Bortolami Gallery
February 14 - 16, 2020
Paramount Pictures, Los Angeles

From an early age, Barbara Kasten (b. 1936, Chicago; lives in Chicago) understood the importance of the historical avant-garde, in particular artists involved in the Bauhaus and Constructivism.

Kasten’s early photograms and constructed photographs pay homage to pioneering modernists but always pushed the boundaries of the medium, extending it sculpturally and performatively. Born out of Bortolami Gallery’s Artist / City initiative, Kasten began a summer-long residency at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2018. In its trademark building S. R. Crown Hall designed by Mies Van der Rohe, she created a suite of site-specific, sculptural installations out of steel desk frameworks and colored plexiglass.

The Crown Hall Project continued her dialogue with Van der Rohe and the multidisciplinary artist Moholy-Nagy. Later that year, Kasten was commissioned to create Intervention, a new work incorporating elements from the original installation, to present as part of Creative Chicago: An Interview Marathon with Hans Ulrich Obrist, programmed and produced by the Chicago Humanities Festival .

Given new life for Frieze Los Angeles, Kasten’s Intervention brings the artist back to the city where she lived and worked for over a decade, and represents her interest in exposing the mechanisms of pictorial and filmic production.

Intervention was originally commissioned as part of Creative Chicago: An Interview Marathon with Hans Ulrich Obrist, programmed and produced in 2018 by the Chicago Humanities Festival in partnership with EXPO CHICAGO and Navy Pier, with the support of the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.

For more information on the fair, click here.