FALKENSTEIN, Claire (Coos Bay, Oregon 1908 - Venice, California 1997)Interlocked Cones

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Claire Falkenstein was an American sculptor, painter, printmaker, jewellery designer and teacher, known for her large-scale abstract public sculptures in metal and glass. Falkenstein was one of the most experimental and productive artists of the 20th century, taking part in radical art groups such as Gutai in Japan, and actively contributing to the birth of informal or art autre, theorised by her friend and art critic Michel Tapié. Before graduating in 1930, he held his first solo exhibition at the East-West Gallery in San Francisco. In the 1930s he devoted himself to sculpture by producing ceramic works, among the first examples of non-objective sculpture in the United States. To the first half of the 1930s dates his series of wooden sculptures called Exploded Volumes, composed of moving parts that can be variously composed by the viewer. In 1948, she began teaching at the California School of Fine Arts, where she came into contact with the Abstract Expressionists. Moving to Paris in 1950, Falkenstein approached the American artists Sam Francis and Paul Jenkins with whom he discussed the relationship between the new informal art and Einstein's theories, developing 'Topology', an artistic expression based on the relationship between matter and space. In 1954, Galleria Montenapoleone in Milan organised a major solo exhibition of his work and in 1961 he created the entrance gates of Peggy Guggenheim's house-museum in Venice. In 1962 he returned to the United States to Venice, California, and from then on he realised numerous public commissions, such as the fountain for the San Diego Art Museum or the stained glass windows for St. Basil's Cathedral in Los Angeles. The artist died on 23 October 1997.