Falkenstein exhibition to open in UB Anderson Gallery

“Claire Falkenstein: Time Elements,” an exhibition exploring the experimental, yet enduring work of American artist Claire Falkenstein, will be on view in the UB Anderson Gallery May 6 through July 29.

An opening reception will take place from 6-8 p.m. May 5 in the gallery.

Curated by UB Art Galleries Acting Director Robert Scalise, the exhibition features a variety of the artist’s works from the formative years 1956-78 that are part of the UB Art Galleries’ permanent collection, along with significant loans from Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC in New York. 

Primarily known for her sculptures of tangled webs of metal, glass, wood and cloth, Falkenstein (1908-97) was a prolific artist; she explored different materials in a variety of mediums, including sculpture, painting, printmaking and jewelry-making. Transcending these mediums, her work fundamentally expresses movement in space through a specific vocabulary she developed and continually referenced throughout her career.

Born in Coos Bay, Oregon, Falkenstein studied at the University of California, Berkeley. She studied with Alexander Archipenko and taught at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and Mills College in Oakland. She moved to Paris in 1950, where she spent 13 years working on her art and taking on several public sculpture commissions, including Peggy Guggenheim’s gates in Venice, Italy. She returned to California with a defined vocabulary for her art. These five fundamental systems, which she consistently drew from, are known as lattice structure, the sign, never ending screen, truss structure and topological structure.

The artist’s exploration into the unconventional also emerges in her printmaking process. In 1962, Falkenstein produced “Struttura Graphica,” a notable portfolio of 11 relief prints done in Italy. Within each print, the process is tested with heavy embossing of shapes frequently seen in her sculptures, resulting in 3-dimensional prints that levitate somewhere between printmaking and sculpture.

All 11 works will be on view in the UB exhibition.

In addition to the Peggy Guggenheim gates, important Falkenstein public art commissions include the UCLA Sculpture Garden, pieces for the reflective pool of the San Diego Museum, and the monumental Sun Ribbon wind screen adjacent to the Noguchi Gardens in Costa Mesa.