Daniel Buren and Barbara Kasten at Bortolami

Bortolami presents a two-artist exhibition of Daniel Buren and Barbara Kasten at its 55 Walker space in Tribeca, opening September 9 and running into late October. The two work in different generations and media, yet draw on a shared vocabulary of light, reflection and geometry, each pointing it toward a different end.

Buren, born in 1938, has spent about six decades making work in direct response to the architecture that holds it. He has shown at the Venice Biennale more than ten times and won the Golden Lion in 1986. He took part in documenta V, VI and VII, received Japan's Praemium Imperiale for Painting in 2007, and was selected for MONUMENTA 2012 at the Grand Palais in Paris. A solo show at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny is currently on view.

His contribution here is a group of recent Haut-relief works. Each stands nearly eight feet tall and projects from the wall into the room. Built from aluminum prisms and mirrored panels, they use strong color, reflections and shadows that travel across geometric faces, producing prismatic projections that widen and distort the viewer's field of vision. The pieces include several from the Prismes et miroirs series (DBPF 16, DBPF 47 D and DBPF 7) and Croix 5 – Haut-relief. Scale is consistent across them, while shape and pattern change the effect from one to the next.

Kasten, born in Chicago in 1936 and still based there, is represented by her Construct Polaroids from 1981 to 1983. She assembled mirrors, screens, plexiglass and geometric solids into temporary studio constructions, photographed them, then took them apart, so the materials are both subject and process. The series grew out of earlier camera-less work such as cyanotypes and photograms, and her move to Polaroid in 1979. In each frame depth and scale refuse to settle; three-dimensional forms are pressed flat by the camera, and the line between object and image blurs. Titles on view include Construct PC III-A, PC III-C, XXIII, PC I-B, PC 4-B, X-A and XVIII-Y.

Her work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the Guggenheim in New York, among many other collections, and her recent exhibitions include Tate Modern's Shape of Light and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. Together, the two bodies of work move attention between the room a visitor stands in and the space produced by looking, suggesting that perception continually makes and remakes its surroundings.