Claire Falkenstein: San Francisco, Paris, Rome

Ortuzar is pleased to present "Claire Falkenstein: San Francisco, Paris, Rome," the gallery's debut exhibition of work by the American artist whose gates of tangled iron, set with chunks of Murano glass, have welcomed visitors to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice since 1961. The exhibition follows Falkenstein from her formative decades in San Francisco to the avant-garde centers of postwar Paris and Rome, assembling some twenty works—several unseen since the 1950s—in copper, glass, iron, aluminum, plastic, wood, and clay. Together they trace a conviction formed early and held through every change of place and material: the urge, as she described it, to "break up the volume"—to open the closed mass of sculpture and challenge the distinction between interior and exterior space. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Claire Falkenstein Foundation and marks the gallery's first solo presentation of the artist's work since announcing its representation of the Foundation in 2025. At the center of the exhibition are the Suns, the series Falkenstein called "the most complete resolution of my work." Begun in Paris in early 1954, they are built from lengths of metal—first iron, then bronze and copper, finally hollow copper tubing—wrapped and interwoven into webs brazed at every intersection. The accumulated joints make the webs self-supporting—transparent structures that contract into dense thickets or open into airy networks, "all convoluted outside and in," as she described them. _Sun #11_ (1957) is an open corona of brazed bronze wire more than five and a half feet across. Last shown at Galerie Stadler in 1957, at Falkenstein's first Paris solo exhibition, where she was famously photographed standing inside it, the work is on view here for the first time in nearly seventy years. The suspended _Sun #14_ (1958) sets two weights of copper against each other: muscular arcs of tubing draw the principal trajectories, with membranes of threadlike wire knotted between them.