Daniel Buren & Barbara Kasten

Bortolami is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Daniel Buren and Barbara Kasten. For the last six decades, Buren has worked in direct relation to the architectural placing of his works, with an interest in the physical conditions that shape how space is experienced. Kasten's longstanding process includes assembling mirrors, screens, plexiglass, and geometric solids into temporary studio constructions, before using the camera to resolve these arrangements into an image. In this exhibition, the two artists share a similar formal vocabulary, using light, reflection, and geometry to different ends.

For Buren, the wall serves as a point of departure: his Haut-relief works rise nearly eight feet high, extending from the wall into the gallery, while their mirrored surfaces draw in what lies outside the sightline. Constructed from aluminum prisms and mirrored panels, these recent works employ bold colors, reflections, and shadows that move across geometric surfaces, creating prismatic projections that both expand and distort the viewer’s field of vision. Alike in scale, each installation produces distinct effects through variations of shape and pattern. Seen in conjunction, these works reflect Buren’s longstanding interest in complicating the relationship between art, its structuring frameworks, and the spaces in which they are encountered.

Kasten’s Construct Polaroids, made between 1981 and 1983, capture careful arrangements of geometric objects and mirroring surfaces. Built in the studio and dismantled afterward, the materials are presented as both subject and process. The series evolved from earlier experimentations with camera-less photography, such as cyanotypes and photograms, and her eventual turn to the Polaroid in 1979. Within each frame, Kasten’s constructed spaces resist a stable reading of depth and scale. The nonrepresentational, dimensional forms that make up her temporary studio tableaux are flattened through the camera into a single plane, collapsing distinctions between object and image. The resulting compositions exemplify Kasten’s commitment to making the photograph itself the site where space is both constructed and recorded, an approach that has remained central to her work.

Collectively, the works shift our attention between the space we physically occupy and the space produced through acts of looking, revealing perception not as a passive response to an environment, but as a process through which that environment is continually made and remade.

Daniel Buren (b. 1938) has been the subject of major museum exhibitions worldwide. He has exhibited in the Venice Biennale more than 10 times and was awarded the Golden Lion in 1986. Buren participated in documenta V, VI, and VII. In 2007, he received the Praemium Imperiale for Painting from Japan and was selected to exhibit at Monumenta 2012 at the Grand Palais in Paris. He has been the subject of large-scale, solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN, the Art Institute of Chicago, Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, Bozar in Brussels, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Metz, and Malaga, Guggenheim New York and Bilbao, among countless other institutions. His solo exhibition at Musée des impressionnismes, Giverny, France, is on view through November 1. Daniel Buren lives and works in situ.

Barbara Kasten (b. 1936 in Chicago, Illinois) lives and works in Chicago. She received her BFA from the University of Arizona in 1959 and MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1970. Kasten’s work has been exhibited across the United States and Europe. She is currently the subject of solo exhibitions at the M. K. Ciurlionis National Museum of Art, Kaunas, Lithuania, and the Akron Museum of Art, Ohio. Other recent exhibitions include Site Lines, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill- On-Sea, England, 2024; Barbara Kasten: Works, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2020), and Sammlung Goetz, Germany (2022-23); Barbara Kasten: Scenarios, Aspen Art Museum (2020-21); Women in Abstraction, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, and Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain (2021); the 2020 Busan Biennale: Words, an exhibition in ten chapters and five poems, South Korea; Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art, Tate Modern, London (2018); Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE; and Stages, a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia that traveled to the Graham Foundation in Chicago and the MOCA Pacific Design Center (2015-16). Her work is featured in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York; Tate Modern, London; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., among many others.