Falkenstein was an artist driven by a strong commitment to experimentation and a keen attention to natural phenomena. “The only restriction was my own limitations,” she stated, “and I was testing them all the time.” She began her artistic career in San Francisco after receiving a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1930. Near the end of the 1930s, Falkenstein began probing the dynamics between interior and exterior space—void and form—in abstract clay sculptures. Turning to other materials, she famously made woven metal gates accented with local colored glass for Peggy Guggenheim’s villa and eventual museum in Venice. Her elegant smaller-in-scale works, featuring a combination of materials as disparate as copper tubing, glass and wood, display equal measures of poetry and industry. As Falkenstein herself has written, in fusing, brazing and welding to create her own materials she is not “designing form” but “creating matter”. In piece after piece, throughout the trajectory of her lengthy career, the artist builds objects in which ”the meaning of the interior governs the exterior.” This small work exemplifies her fusion of disparate materials into elegant, even playful forms.
