From compelling fabric installations and sculptures to photography, landscape design and architecture, the work of Aleksandra Kasuba (1923-2019) combines countless ideas about how we experience the world around us. The intersection of technology and nature enchanted the late Lithuanian artist, and she often experimented with a variety of materials and the effects of light, hue and tension to explore relationships between ourselves and notions of shelter and place.
The first major exhibition of her work in Europe, Imagine the future bee Carré d’Art – Musée d’Art ContemporainInvestigates the incredible breadth of Kasuba’s artistry.
Kasuba, born in an aristocratic family, registered for the art school in 1941 and mainly focused on sculpture and textile. She married artist Vytautas Kašuba, with whom she fled Lithuania in 1944 in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation of the country. They landed in a displaced person camp in Germany, where they stayed until they went to New York in 1947, and her experience and an immigrant significantly influenced her work.
In the US, Kasuba found employment in crafts and design and began to lay the foundation for its future artistic practice, which merged applied and functional art with abstraction. Her interdisciplinary practice took shape in the 1950s and 1960s and was deeply influenced by principles of modernism and the era of space exploration, which throw the existence of humanity on earth into a new light.
Mid-20th-century stock exchange about vernacular architecture also inspired Kasuba, and she was moved by a visit to the exhibition by Bernard Rudofsky from 1964 Architecture without architects In the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He took a broader picture of global architecture than the field typically covered and emphasized the ingenuity and beauty of structures built by indigenous cultures.
Rudofsky suggested that modernism – in particular modern architecture – had lost contact with the real needs of society, and he urged viewers to pay attention to artistic, quirky, culturally rich local styles free of elitist design rules.
The artistic practice of Kasuba also mixes with daily life in her own living spaces, from her house in New York City in the 1970s to Rock Hill House, A sculptural home in the New Mexico desert that she completed between 2001 and 2005.
The convergence of sculpture and the environmental design also fascinated the artist, which accelerated unique material combinations in large -scale public interventions and spatial installations. Delivered about how we continue places and are hit by our environment, she was also instructed to deal with countless public wall installations with materials such as brick, marble and granite.
Kasuba investigated the relationships between transparency, color and light in works as ‘spectrum’, privileged organic shapes and a compelling passage made of stretched nylon. Her Space Shelterden Series, composed of fabric in curved forms without ninety degrees, is an example of her desire to harmonize nature, people and technology.
Imagine the future Continues until March 23 in Nimes, France. More information about the museum website.
