The 88-year-old Chicago artist takes photography to a whole new level – as her new East Sussex show, which uses fluorescent panels to sculpt with colour, proves

Sunshine beams down on Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion for the first time since Barbara Kasten arrived to install her first institutional solo show in the UK. Standing outside, where the modernist building faces the wide sea front, the 88-year-old American artist is delighted. Ghostly pink shapes wriggle behind the huge windows. Devising the show, at home in Chicago, she’d feared the sunlight would be too strong, causing a photographic white-out, but no: “The light here is so gentle.”

Inside the exhibition hall, the wriggling pink light is revealed as reflections on fluorescent acrylic plexi-panels, which are clamped into what Kasten conceives as large stage flats. She has yet to decide on their final placement when I visit, but is clear that this is “the backstage area”. The expanse of windows facing the sea is the “proscenium arch”, which she has accentuated with columns of brightly coloured perspex. They lean up against the window frames, casting their own colours dramatically across the floor and each other, while mixing into something mysteriously different in the plexi-panels behind them.