Tina Barney: The Beginning
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Spanning the years 1976 to 1980, The Beginning brings together the earliest works of acclaimed American photographer Tina Barney (b. 1945). Featuring images largely unseen by the public, the exhibition chronicles a period of technical and artistic development that would lay the foundation for the complex and incisive tableaux that ultimately established Barney as a key figure in international photography. While quarantining during the Covid-19 outbreak, Barney began to sort through her archive of thousands of 35mm negatives, discovering long-forgotten images that reanimated her memories of life as a young artist: “The photographs in this book seem like X-rays of my mind,” she has said.
Concurrent with the exhibition, a book of fifty of the works was published by Radius Books. See more and purchase the title here.
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Barney’s life in photography began in the 1970s by capturing the rhythms and rituals of those closest to her. Her early intuition for directing the eye through composition is demonstrable in these works, informed by her love of the Old Master paintings she studied in museums throughout her youth. Characterized in part by idiosyncratic crops that bring reflective attention to even the subtlest gestures of their subjects, Barney’s works explore the unspoken tensions and intimacies that abound in families and friendships with affectionate humor. Charting passages through childhood and adolescence to the building of families and eventual aging, Barney’s subjects navigate both private and public spaces—swimming pools, gardens, tennis courts, diners, shops, and museums—while her presence as an observer teases out both their exterior and interior experiences. Implied is an inquisitive reflection on the symbiosis between our relational and psychological experiences and the cultural and historical frameworks we each inherit.
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Tina, Ketchum, Idaho, 1977. Photographer unknown. -
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Tina smoking at the opening of her first show at The Potatoe Gallery, May 1977. Photo by Mary Rolland.
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Tina and Andy hanging her first show at The Potatoe Gallery, May 1977. Photo by Mary Rolland.
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Barney’s photographs are in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; and the Nicola Erni Collection, Switzerland; among many others. Barney's work was included in the 1987 Whitney Biennial and has been the subject of major recent exhibitions at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York; the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA; the Frist Center in Nashville, TN; the Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI; the Museum of Art, Salzburg, Austria; and the Barbican Art Gallery, London, United Kingdom. A career-spanning, eponymous monograph on the artist was published by Rizzoli in September 2017.
This is Barney’s third solo exhibition at Kasmin after joining the gallery in 2015, and follows Four Decades (2015) and Landscapes (2018). -
Works
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News
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Tina Barney featured in The New Yorker
by Vince Aletti March 18, 2023 View More -
Tina Barney: The Photographer's Origin Story
by Hilarie Sheets February 24, 2023With a show at Kasmin and a new book of rediscovered photographs, both called “The Beginning,” the ethnographer of the elite reflects on finding her...View More
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Publications
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About the Artist
Self-portrait by Tina Barney. -
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