Barbara Ann Astman

Waddington's Auction House Biography and Notes

Pivoting between counter-culture politic and consumer-culture critique, Barbara Astman reliably issues a challenging voice on concerns related to media, feminism, and framing that have, in turn, helped advance an all-important generation of contemporary art. Among Astman’s most enduring artistic occupations is her employment and elevation of photography, a medium that underwent a dramatic shift in perception and assignment in the early 1980s and became more widely accepted within the visual arts. Evoking at turns humour and urgency, Astman’s adroit use of archetypal form, her consistent self-reflexivity, and her dexterous adoption of new technologies has helped establish her as a leading woman artist pursuing vulnerable self- and societal analyses through a still-evolving frame. Her famed Red Series (1980-81) is representative of the artist’s early focuses and formal strengths. Its assemblage of uniformly-painted objects (both banal and cheerful) encircle and occupy an unseeing protagonist who attempts to position herself, to perform herself, amid the flotsam of her competing roles. Thirty years later, Astman remains the moving target of her own work, this time dancing with the ubiquitous and commoditized image of Che – a persona that inspires personal attachment. The series lends intimacy to symbolism, and proposes contradictions that Astman still troubles as she pursues.