Barbara Astman

After completing her studies at Rochester Institute of Technology, Barbara Astman came to Canada in 1970. She has been exhibiting in public galleries and museums across Canada and abroad since 1975 at venues such as: the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON; George Eastman House in Rochester, NY; the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, France; and Galleria Luca Polazzoli in Milan, Italy. Astman has produced numerous public commissions, some of the most recent include the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, in 2005 and the new Loblaw Headquarters in Brampton, Ontario, 2006. Barbara Astman is also an art professor who has mentored numerous emerging artists at the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto where she has been teaching since the mid 1970s. Astman is represented by the Corkin Gallery, Toronto, Ontario.

A catalogue of her work, Barbara Astman: personal persona, a 20-year survey, documents her 1995 retrospective at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. She is also featured in The Maclean's Companion to Canadian Arts and Culture, and Canadian Art in the Twentieth Century. Her work is found in important public collections including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, France, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England.

"Barbara Astman's career has spanned more than 23 years of photo-based media innovations, but has always been about more than the lure of new technology. Astman's staged and sequential work suggests issues of identity, systems of representation, gender perspectives and the anti-narrative of popular irony."
Ihor Holubizky, art/text 1998.

"In the early 1980s, there was a clear delineation between what was considered photography and what was classified as art, and I felt I didn't fit into either category. That is when I started calling myself a camera artist - one that was working within the contemporary art world as a whole."
Barbara Astman

A Toronto based practicing artist since the mid 1970s Astman's art practice has been a hybrid of photography, new media, sculpture and light projection installations; her staged and sequential work suggests issues of identity, history, systems of representation and gender perspectives.