From the beginning, Falkenstein rejected fixed categories. “Everything is drawing,” she insisted, a conviction that propelled her across materials and scales. She developed a personal vocabulary of repeated “signs” that multiply into networks; welded lattices functioning as porous structures; spiraling Never Ending Screens; Suns that articulate space as volume and force; and allover paintings and drawings whose repeated marks generate atmospheric fields. For Falkenstein, drawing—its rhythm, its interval, its capacity to create space rather than describe it—remained the engine of composition.

Born in 1908 in Coos Bay, Oregon, Falkenstein earned her BA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1930, and began exhibiting immediately. She taught widely in the Bay Area, including at UC Berkeley, Mills College, and the California School of Fine Arts (later renamed the San Francisco Art Institute). Early works in clay and carved wood, along with painted reliefs, probed sculptural volume through interior voids and movement rather than mass. In the early 1930s, Falkenstein encountered artists Alexander Archipenko and László Moholy-Nagy, who reinforced her sense of abstraction as a field of structural problems to be solved, not depicted.

Around this time, Falkenstein’s budding interest in science and emerging theories of space-time began to seep into her work. By the mid-1940s, she developed her Set Structures, which modeled simple mathematical ideas through sculptural variation. Falkenstein envisioned her art as a means of modeling these radical concepts, pursuing structures that might emulate these discoveries. She began working in metal as her paintings and murals were evolving a biomorphic, Surrealist-inflected vocabulary—parallel efforts that revealed her growing preoccupation with structure. With growing intensity, she explored new materials, with jewelry and experimental films emerging as parallel practices, each testing structural ideas through process. 

In 1950, Falkenstein moved to Paris, entering the postwar avant-garde with deliberately humble materials. Stovepipe wire—linear, inexpensive, and unforgiving—became central to her work. Her choice of accessible materials was shaped in part by postwar scarcity but also reflected a broader ambition: to create forms that expanded outward without limit. She twisted, flattened, welded, and multiplied wire into porous, translucent lattices that critic Michel Tapié praised as “almost a new material coming out of her hands.” While in Paris, she continued to exhibit widely and forged deep connections with Alberto Giacometti, Jean Arp, Alberto Burri, and other artists in the city’s artistic and intellectual milieu.

Falkenstein further refined her vocabulary in 1959, when she reduced her drawn mark to a single, repeated stroke, which she called Moving Point. The repeated sign becomes, through multiplication, a field on paper and, when translated into metal or glass, the basic module of a three-dimensional structure. The Moving Point remained central to her practice for decades, shaping her work across painting, printmaking, and projected and kinetic experiments.

Falkenstein’s experimental approach to material and form—particularly her porous wire lattices and modular, repeatable structures—proved inherently scalable, lending themselves to architecturally sized commissions. She created the Pignatelli Gates (1957) at Princess Pignatelli’s villa near Rome—latticed doors into which she set large chunks of glass like bezel-set stones. After seeing these works, Peggy Guggenheim commissioned a new set of gates for her palazzo in Venice, today the entry gates to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Working in Venice also brought Falkenstein into collaboration with glassblowers on the nearby island of Murano, leading directly to the Fusions: glass and metal joined through heat, with molten glass functioning as both color and structural brace. 

In 1963, Falkenstein returned to the United States and settled in Venice, California, where her systems expanded across media and scale. That year she completed Orbit the Earth #1, a monumental multi-panel Moving Point painting that evokes both microcosmic cell structures and macrocosmic views of the planet. Works such as Predator (1963–64) tested the expressive range of the lattice and the sign, while her Point as a Set series turned networks of looping copper tubing into spherical and volumetric structures. Painting remained a continuous throughline in Falkenstein’s practice: from early reliefs to her biomorphic canvases of the 1940s, and, later, the expansive Moving Point paintings whose rhythmic marks generate their own spatial and chromatic fields.

In Southern California, Falkenstein continued to create large-scale commissions, including her Structure and Flow fountain for the California Federal Savings building in Los Angeles (later destroyed), a major fountain commissioned in 1968 by Dr. Louis Heyn and later donated to the Long Beach Museum of Art, and her DNA Molecule (1970–71) for Hyland Laboratories. Her work for St. Basil Catholic Church in Los Angeles (1968–69), the largest commission of her career, encompassed the design of the church’s windows and doors. Fifteen towering window-sculptures in Cor-Ten steel and glass extend the Never Ending Screen into architecture, translating her systems of lattice, sign, screen, truss, and topology into urban and sacred space. Across these projects, Falkenstein used engineering as a sculptural tool, making the behavior of water, glass, copper, and gravity perceptible as form. 

Drawing remained a constant engine throughout her practice. Innovations in printmaking found a key expression in the Struttura Grafica portfolio (Milan, 1964), while jewelry––spirals, braids, and fused glass-and-metal forms––continued to test structural ideas at an intimate scale. In later year she developed additional topological works and a body of lyrical paintings that softened but did not abandon her underlying systems. Across mediums and decades, Falkenstein sustained a vision in which structure, space, and energy remained inseparable—and endlessly generative. 

Claire Falkenstein continued to live and work in Venice, California, until her death in 1997. Her work has been the subject of numerous major solo exhibitions, including presentations at the Pasadena Museum of California Art; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; the Long Beach Museum of Art; and the Fresno Art Museum. Her work frequently features in major institutional exhibitions worldwide, including recent presentations at the Centre Pompidou Malaga; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Grey Art Museum, New York; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Guggenheim Bilbao; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Her work is held in public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Palm Springs Art Museum; the San Diego Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.