From immersive material installations and sculptures to pictures, panorama design, and structure, the work of Aleksandra Kasuba (1923-2019) merges myriad concepts about how we expertise the world round us. The intersection of know-how and nature enchanted the late Lithuanian artist, and he or she typically experimented with quite a lot of supplies and the results of sunshine, hue, and rigidity to discover relationships between ourselves and notions of shelter and place.
The primary main exhibition of her work in Europe, Imagining the Future at Carré d’Artwork—Musée d’Artwork Contemporain, explores the unimaginable breadth of Kasuba’s artistry.
Born to an aristocratic household, Kasuba enrolled in artwork college in 1941, focusing totally on sculpture and textiles. She married artist Vytautas Kašuba, with whom she fled Lithuania in 1944 within the wake of the Nazi occupation of the nation. They landed in a displaced-persons camp in Germany the place they stayed till making their approach to New York in 1947, and her expertise as a refugee and an immigrant considerably affected her work.
Within the U.S., Kasuba discovered employment in crafts and design and commenced laying the foundations for her future creative apply, which merged utilized and useful arts with abstraction. Her interdisciplinary apply took form in earnest the Fifties and Sixties and was deeply influenced by tenets of modernism and the period of house exploration, which forged humanity’s existence on Earth in a brand new mild.
Mid-Twentieth century scholarship on vernacular structure additionally impressed Kasuba, and he or she was moved by a go to to Bernard Rudofsky’s 1964 exhibition Structure With out Architects on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in New York. He took a broader view of worldwide structure than the sphere usually lined and emphasised the ingenuity and great thing about constructions constructed by Indigenous cultures.
Rudofsky prompt that modernism—significantly fashionable structure—had misplaced contact with the true wants of society, and he urged viewers to concentrate to creative, idiosyncratic, culturally wealthy native kinds free from elitist design guidelines.
Kasuba’s creative apply blended with every day life in her personal dwelling areas, too, from her New York Metropolis house within the Nineteen Seventies to Rock Hill Home, a sculptural dwelling within the New Mexico desert she accomplished between 2001 and 2005.
The convergence of sculpture and environmental design additionally fascinated the artist, spurring distinctive materials mixtures in large-scale public interventions and spatial installations. Involved with how we transfer via locations and are affected by our environment, she was additionally commissioned to create quite a few public wall installations utilizing supplies like brick, marble, and granite.
Kasuba explored the relationships between transparency, coloration, and light-weight in works like “Spectrum,” privileging natural shapes and an immersive passageway constituted of stretched nylon. Her House Shelters collection, composed of material in curving varieties with out ninety-degree angles, exemplifies her need to harmonize nature, folks, and know-how.
Imagining the Future continues via March 23 in Nîmes, France. Study extra on the museum’s web site.
