Claire Falkenstein with Sun #13 at Galerie Stadler, Paris, 1960.
Courtesy of the Claire Falkenstein Foundation, New York.
Join us on Wednesday, October 7th, from 4:30-6:30 pm for a panel discussion on Claire Falkenstein (1908–1997), whose first solo exhibition with the gallery is on view through October 31. The panel will feature David Evans Frantz, Executive Director of the Claire Falkenstein Foundation, art historian Marin R. Sullivan, whose biography of the artist is forthcoming from Getty Publications in 2027, and artist Arlene Shechet.
Most known for her gates of tangled iron, set with chunks of Murano glass, which still welcome visitors to the Peggy Guggenheim collection in Venice, Falkenstein, Claire's career was a relentless exploration into sculpture and its material possibilities. At the center of the practice is a concern she returned to for four decades: 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. Continually exploring forms that expand outward without limit, that impulse took many forms: 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.
The conversation will look at Falkenstein's life, work, and how her approach to sculpture anticipated artistic practices today. Shechet, who describes her own practice as “drawing through sculpture”—echoing Falkenstein’s own assertion that “everything is drawing”—will join two leading voices on the artist for a discussion held in the gallery amid its current presentation of work made during Falkenstein’s years living and working in San Francisco and Europe.
David Evans Frantz is Executive Director of the Claire Falkenstein Foundation, a position he has held since 2024. During his tenure at the Foundation, he has overseen the complete inventory of Falkenstein’s works on paper, established a new relationship with Ortuzar, and created a website dedicated to Falkenstein’s legacy and the Foundation’s philanthropic work, among other activities. Frantz has previously held curatorial positions at ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, and the Palm Springs Art Museum. As a curator, Frantz has organized numerous exhibitions highlighting the work of often-underrecognized queer artists. His curatorial projects include "A Queer Arcana: Art, Magic, and Spirit" (2025–2026); "Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams" (2024–2026); "Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art," co-curated with C. Ondine Chavoya (2023–2026); and "Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.," also co-curated with Chavoya (2018–2022). Frantz is co-editor, with Christina Linden and Chris E. Vargas, of Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects (Hirmer, 2023), a project of the Museum of Trans Hirstory & Art (MOTHA).
Arlene Shechet is a sculptor known for her effortless combination of disparate elements, precarious and provisional arrangements, and boundary-collapsing visual paradoxes. With gravity-defying work that seems to tilt, contort, bend, and melt, Shechet’s sculptures appear to be set in motion while remaining still, unearthing the expressive potential of material and forms and inviting us to sit with—and move around—its contradictions. Shechet has changed the landscape of ceramics since she began working with clay in 2007. Highly technical and yet entirely intuitive, her work embraces improvisation and seeks to examine the humor and pathos of being alive and in a body. The artist is recognized as having led a resurgence of ceramics in contemporary art through her eclectic experiments with glazes, hybrid forms, and pedestals. Embracing risk, and making works that refuse to sit still, the finished sculptures speak to issues of change and serve as great analogs to complex lives.
Marin R. Sullivan, PhD, is a Chicago-based art historian, curator, and consultant. She specializes in the histories of modern and contemporary sculpture, especially its interdisciplinary, intermedial dialogues with photography, design, and the built environment. Sullivan is the author of Alloys: American Sculpture and Architecture at Midcentury (Princeton University Press, 2022), Sculptural Materiality in the Age of Conceptualism (Routledge, 2017), and the forthcoming To Hell with the Critics: The Creative Life of Claire Falkenstein (Getty, 2027) as well as numerous catalogues, essays, and articles. She recently co-curated Isamu Noguchi: “I am not a designer,” organized by the High Museum of Art and currently serves as the Director of Research and Programs for the George Rickey Foundation.