Tina Barney: The Beginning with James Welling

September 11, 2023
  • Kasmin is delighted to announce a conversation between Tina Barney and the artist James Welling on the occasion of her...
    Tina Barney, Waterslide in Fog, 1979, archival pigment print.

    Kasmin is delighted to announce a conversation between Tina Barney and the artist James Welling on the occasion of her most recent publication The Beginning being held at the Rizzoli Bookstore in New York City on September 11 between 6–8pm.

    In the summer of 2020, at the height of Covid and quarantine restrictions, Barney began to sort through her archive, which contained hundreds of 35mm negatives taken between 1976 and 1980. Finding these long-forgotten images engendered a rediscovery of some of her most intimate memories as a young artist: “the photographs in this book seem like X-rays of my mind and thoughts through the summers I spent with family and friends on the East Coast and in Sun Valley, Idaho.”

    Revisiting her work from decades prior, Barney found herself meditating on who and where she was at the time, as well as why and how she approached specific subjects. What was the impetus to capture these moments? The Beginning encompasses Barney’s nostalgic exploration of her earliest work in the medium, and further reflects a self-examination of this formative period through a critical lens.

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  • About the Artist

    Tina Barney
    Self-portrait by Tina Barney.

    Tina Barney

    Over the course of her 40-year career, acclaimed American photographer Tina Barney (b. 1945) has illuminated the inner lives of her subjects, observing the generational repetition of familial traditions and rituals as played out in domestic settings. Recognized for her large-format photographic portraits realized in vibrant color—and more recently, for her foray into landscape photography—Barney demonstrates the same complexity and sensitivity whether she is shooting world-renowned celebrities or the figures and faces of those known to her personally. 

    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, Zug, 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 Kunsthalle Wien, Austria; the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA; the Frist Center in Nashville, TN; the Barbican Art Gallery, London, United Kingdom; and the Museum of Art, Salzburg, Austria. In September 2017, Rizzoli USA published Tina Barney, an eponymous monograph spanning her four-decade international career.

    Barney's third solo exhibition with Kasmin, The Beginning, opened in March 2023. Concurrent with the exhibition, a book of fifty works was published by Radius Books.

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