Claire Falkenstein

Claire Falkenstein (1908–1997) was an American artist whose practice moved between sculpture, painting, printmaking, jewelry, and architectural commissions. After early work in the Bay Area, she lived in Paris during the 1950s, where she engaged with Art Informel and developed an abstract language concerned with topology, open form, and the relation of matter to space. Her best-known works use wire, metal tubing, and fused glass to create latticed structures in which voids are integral to the form. In 1961 she completed the metal-and-glass entrance gates for Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo in Venice; later public commissions followed in California. Falkenstein received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978. Her work is represented in institutional collections including SFMOMA, LACMA, MoMA, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.