tensile sculptures at aleksandra kasuba's first france retrospective

imagining the future on view at Carré d’Art in Nîmes, france

Carré d’Art in Nîmes presents Imagining the Future, the first major retrospective in Europe dedicated to Aleksandra Kasuba who passed away in 2019. Spanning an entire floor, the exhibition celebrates the Lithuanian-American artist’s legacy, looking at her pioneering work at the intersection of art, design, and spatial environments across several loosely chronological segments.

The artist, who fled Lithuania during World War II and later established herself in New York, became renowned for her experimental spatial environments composed of tensile fabrics. With these, she envisioned a world beyond right angles — organic, fluid spaces designed to enhance the sensory and psychological experience of those who inhabit them. Shaped like luminous translucent silos, these works appear at Imagining the Future alongside sandstone mosaics, plans, and surreal collages, showcasing how she has continued to experiment with scale and illusion throughout her practice. As such, the exhibition traces her artistic evolution, exploring themes of loss and displacement as well as imagined futures and hope, and the integration of art with science and technology. Organized in collaboration with the Lithuanian National Museum of Art as part of the 2024 Lithuanian Season in France, it will run until March 23, 2025.

image courtesy the Lithuanian National Museum of Art

aleksandra kasuba’s first european perspective

Elona Lubytė curates the retrospective as a thematic journey through Aleksandra Kasuba’s oeuvre, beginning with a section titled Wanderer where The Little Man (1950), an existential alter ego that recurs throughout her work, greets the audience. This character, representing the lonely yet resilient wanderer, finds striking expressions in Kasuba’s Utility for the Soul (1970) manifesto and later watercolors. The exhibition then moves into Spectrum, An Afterthought, where Kasuba’s fascination with light and color comes to life in a world of immersion. Originally conceived in 1975, this installation conjures a traversable rainbow pathway — an immersive, prismatic environment that captures the artist’s belief in the transformative nature of light.

Kasuba’s contributions to the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) movement in the US in the 1960s are explored in Laboratory of Environments. Here, early plexiglass reliefs and models for the utopian Global Village (1971–1972) illustrate her engagement with technology-driven social spaces and spatial imagination.

image courtesy the Lithuanian National Museum of Art. Photo by Antanas Lukšėnas

celebrating her explorations of art, technology, architecture

In Environments for the Soul, the curation examines the evolution of Aleksandra Kasuba’s use of textiles and flexible structures to impact the interface between subject and environment, beginning with Live-In Environment (1971–1972), installed in her own home. This work speaks to her practice of redefining human interaction with space, while ahead, Suspended Gothic (1979), an ambitious public installation created in collaboration with students, reinforces her emphasis on communal artistic engagement.

This dialogue between art and science is further explored in Art in Science, which revisits Kasuba’s participation in research programs at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science. The accompanying catalogue of this section also includes a tribute from renowned architect Frei Otto, who praised Kasuba’s mastery of tensile structures and organic form.‘It is about the permutation of forms, natural to things in states of tension. Kasuba’s inspiration comes from organic structures and forms of nature,’ he writes. Rock Hill House concludes the Imagining the Future exhibition, chronicling the artist’s later years in the New Mexico desert, where she built a self-sustaining home inspired by natural landscapes. Photographs by Judith S. Miller, an artist-resident at the Rock Hill House, document the desert’s flora and fauna, reinforcing Kasuba’s lifelong exploration of harmony between built and natural environments.

image courtesy the Lithuanian National Museum of Art