Barbara Kasten. Post-Abstraction

Barbara Kasten. Post-Abstraction is a survey of six decades of work by the American photographer - around 100 photographs, sculptures, and installations, plus a new light-based intervention by the artist in Zachęta’s staircase. The Polish thread of the exhibition is her early-1970s collaboration with Magdalena Abakanowicz in Poznań.

Zachęta on the exhibition:

Barbara Kasten. Post-Abstraction is the first comprehensive exhibition of the American artist’s work in this part of Europe - and a return to a place that years ago helped shape her artistic language. This cross-sectional presentation of 100 works by Barbara Kasten across various media - photography, sculpture, and installation - is complemented by the artist’s intervention in the staircase area of Zachęta.

The exhibition recalls an important stage in the artist’s biography connected with Poland. In the early 1970s, Kasten, as a Fulbright-Hays program scholar, worked with sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz at the State Higher School of Fine Arts (now the University of Arts) in Poznań. Fascinated by the Polish school of artistic textile - which treated fiber as a sculptural medium - she created a series of sisal sculptures there. The works then went to Warsaw for an individual presentation at the Sculpture Gallery. Although these were her last sculptural works, the experience of working in Poland proved to be groundbreaking. It reinforced an approach that still defines the artist’s work today: the image as building relationships between object, space, and light. The exhibition at Zachęta shows how this thinking developed from early experiments in the 1970s to contemporary works.

After returning to the United States, the artist began experimenting with photography - from photograms and cyanotypes to staged Polaroids. Kasten does not photograph existing reality. The subject of her works is not an object - whether studio-based or architectural - but rather the relationships between its elements: the way light, often saturated with color, refracts and transforms space. In the studio and outdoors, she builds her own arrangements using mirrors, steel rods, grids, color filters, and simple geometric solids. Using light and reflections, she constructs images without digital intervention.

The title Post-Abstraction refers to the dialogue Kasten conducts with the history of the avant-garde, constructivism, and modernist and postmodernist architecture. The artist does not repeat the language of abstraction - rather, she rewrites it, tests it, and confronts it with the experience of looking. She is interested in how geometric forms and light constructions function today: in specific interiors, in relation to their surroundings and the audience.

The exhibition at Zachęta does not have a chronological arrangement. 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 exploring light, color, structure, and the relationships between elements of an image. Post-Abstraction is a review of six decades of the artist’s work and an invitation to conscious looking - to experiencing space where light becomes material, and the viewer becomes part of the composition.

Barbara Kasten was born in 1936 in Chicago. She studied painting at the University of Arizona and sculptural textile design at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Her mentor was Trude Guermonprez, whose teaching method originated from the Bauhaus. In 1971-1972, as a Fulbright-Hays program scholar, she completed an internship in the studio of sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz at the State Higher School of Fine Arts (now the University of 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 held 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.

What to expect

The exhibition runs from 13 March to 7 June 2026. On view are around 100 works from six decades: photographs - from photograms and cyanotypes to staged Polaroids - sisal sculptures from the 1970s, and light installations. The layout is thematic rather than chronological: rooms lead through 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 Polish thread is Kasten’s 1971-1972 stay in Poznań. As a Fulbright-Hays scholar she worked with Magdalena Abakanowicz at PWSSP (today the University of Arts). She produced a series of sisal sculptures there - her last sculptural works - which were then shown at the Sculpture Gallery in Warsaw. The experience in Poland shaped her later approach to photography: the image as the construction of relationships between object, space, and light.

A new light-based intervention by the artist occupies Zachęta’s staircase.

Tickets and opening hours are on Zachęta’s website.

Museum profile: Zachęta.