Artist to Watch: Claudia Wieser’s Colorful Constellations Cause a Stir Amongst Collectors
The Berlin-based creative's works will be on view in "A Personal Unit" at Marianne Boesky in New York in October, with additional work on view in Paris during Art Basel Paris
Claudia Wieser recalls first encountering the works of Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Ryman as a teenager and finding it a “spiritual experience,” prompting a creative epiphany. Today, she is still under their spell, garnering buzz for her paintings, drawings, and sculptures, which radiate with rhythmic geometries in a kaleidoscopic palette not unlike those of Kelly and Ryman. Her colorful constellations and absorbing grids have taken the form of everything from intimately scaled abstractions on paper to ambitious large-scale commissions for the Public Art Fund in New York and Musée Yves Saint Laurent in Paris.
Whether displayed in a white-cube gallery or a bustling city park, her work elicits a wide range of interpretations. To some, the playful patterns and rounded edges appear as homages to European art and design movements, such as Bauhaus and Concrete Art. For others, the towering mirror sculptures dressed in photographic prints and arranged in catchy tile configurations are a comment on the rapid speed of our visual culture.
“My forms can be considered spiritual,” she says. “I am very open to every reception.” Before attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Wieser trained as a blacksmith; working with iron and steel continues to inform her multifaceted practice. “Those years with metal made me sensitive toward the reactions of each material, which are susceptible to every little decision,” says the Berlin-based artist. Mixed-media pieces—including her mirror-and-glazed-tile paintings—will be featured alongside a series of textiles and drawings in her solo show “A Personal Unit,” at New York gallery Marianne Boesky in October. A modular four-piece installation in the center taps into Wieser’s malleable narrative ambitions. The cubic ceramic sculpture is reshuffled weekly by the gallery staff for alternative arrangements of its various shapes and colors.
“My work is always composed of small units,” says Wieser, whose range will be on view in a special presentation with Boesky at the gallerist’s annual pop-up in partnership with Art Basel Paris, this year in the eighth arrondissement. “It never just comes out of one big expression.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2025 Late Fall Issue in the section “Artists to Watch.” Subscribe to the magazine.