Claire de Santa Coloma
Urform

11 SEP – 7 NOV 2026

Opening – 10 SEP 2026, 6–10 pm

We are pleased to present Claire de Santa Coloma’s third solo exhibition at Galerie Friese on the occasion of Berlin Art Week 2026. The exhibition “Urform” features an installation of wooden sculptures extending across the gallery.

Claire de Santa Coloma’s (b. 1983, Buenos Aires) practice revolves around materiality, space, and perception. Her point of departure is a found piece of wood, which the artist works by hand with as few interventions as possible. Each piece bears traces of its origin, and of the relationship between humans and their environment.

The organic sculptures recall stones smoothed by water, organs, eggs – archaic “Urformen” (primordial forms), so familiar as if they had always existed. Forms that seem to precede the human hand, and yet require it in order to appear. At the same time, they stand in the tradition of Classical Modernism, particularly Brâncuși’s iconic abstract formal language, whose pioneering, spatial arrangements de Santa Coloma also takes up in installative terms.

Presented on pedestals resembling worktables, de Santa Coloma arranges the works as a spatial, tactile installation that leads through the gallery. Walking, touching, thinking – the works demand the whole body, not just the eye. The forms are in constant flux, related to one another and yet never identical. A process without end, sustained by the very necessity of making, by the ever-renewed attempt to approach the one form. The installation reflects the artistic decisions and questions that guide the working process: it reveals the threshold between natural form and abstraction, between object and sculpture.

In addition, in the first room of the gallery, we present a 60-part block of new paintings on paper by Leipzig-based artist Franziska Holstein (b. 1978).