Berlin | ArtRegion: Berlin, Schöneberg

ChertLüdde

Aleksandra Kasuba: Utility for the Soul

4. Juni – 3. September 2022

Aleksandra Kasuba was born in 1923 in Ginkūnai Manor, Lithuania, into a distinguished family with progressive leanings. From 1941-1943, she enrolled in art school in Kaunas and Vilnius, where she studied sculpture and textiles. She fled the country in 1944 with her sculptor husband Vytautas Kašuba during the Soviet reoccupation of the Baltic States, living for a time in a displaced persons camp in Germany before moving to New York in 1947. In the following years, Kasuba cultivated her art-making in a metamorphosing milieu of individuals deeply affected by the war, who in response envisioned radical dreams for the future.

Regarded as a pioneer of stretch fabric and its morphable capabilities under tension, Kasuba consistently developed a vision of sustainable architecture as a social instrument. She captured people’s fascination with her enveloping, soft and translucent environments made of synthetic fabrics – a counterpart to the rigid architectural styles of the 20th century. Her vision of built habitats as having the potential to fundamentally affect individuals and society for the better manifested in an imaginative body of work spanning public commissions, residential homes, mosaics, textile works, paintings and collages.