Tina Barney at ADAA: The Art Show

Booth B1
Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue, New York

Tuesday, October 29: Benefit Preview
Wednesday, October 30–Friday, November 1: 12–7pm
Saturday, November 2: 12–6pm

For ADAA: The Art Show 2024, Kasmin announces a solo booth of work by influential American photographer Tina Barney (b. 1945). Featuring rarely exhibited works, the presentation explores the theme of family across five decades of the artist’s career and coincides with Tina Barney: Family Ties, her first European retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris (September 28, 2024–January 19, 2025), traveling to Kutxa Fundazioa in San Sebastián, Spain (July–October 2025).

As Barney investigates intergenerational rituals, her large-format work magnifies the brilliant colors and vibrant textures of her subjects and their surroundings. From the early development of her practice in the late 1970s to her most recent work for international fashion campaigns, the family has offered Barney a framework to probe cultural habits as they are passed down over generations. First illuminating the inner lives of her own relatives and close friends, and later photographing European families previously unknown to her, Barney has dedicated her practice to creating intricate tableaux that call attention to the subtle nuances of her subjects’ interactions. Whether candid or carefully staged, Barney’s works reveal unexpected connections between her subjects which are complicated or magnified by the psychological resonance of their domestic settings.

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“The scale and ambition at which she was making pictures in 1982 was absolutely in the vanguard. Her capacity to marry that scale with the spontaneity of a snapshot aesthetic gave it such a unique place in the field.”
—Sarah Meister, Executive Director of Aperture

Spanning five decades, the presentation assembles work from across the artist’s most celebrated series including “Theater of Manners,” “The Europeans,” and “The Beginning.” Subtle group dynamics emerge in these works, such as the observable relationship patterns between siblings and close friends, whether in the candid postures of The Flag (1977) or the composed stances of Two Sisters (2019)—two works previously unexhibited until the Jeu de Paume retrospective. In Julianne Moore and Family (1999), the actor poses with her husband and young son for an editorial commission, an image that was last exhibited 20 years ago at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The relationship between spouses is most pronounced in Mr. and Mrs. Leo Castelli (1998), a portrait of the late art dealer and Barbara Bertozzi Castelli, in which Bertozzi’s dramatic gesture provides the only dynamic movement in the frame. Elsewhere, children appear to mirror the gestures of their parents, as in The Hands (2002), which depicts a French father and son. The places where families gather become generative subjects in works such as Graham Cracker Box (1983), where five figures around a kitchen table appear resolutely immersed in their own internal worlds.

"These theatrical tableaus crackle with telling gestures, microexpressions and visual tensions both humorous and psychological."
—Hilarie M. Sheets, The New York Times

"Instead of social critique, Tina Barney prefers a sort of interrogative observation: 'The only way we can examine ourselves, or the history of our lives, is through photography,' she wrote in 2017."
—Quentin Bajac, Director of the Jeu de Paume