Claire Lieberman

FUNNY BALL
March 10 - April 9

Dark sphere with concave and convex edges casting a shadow onto a white plane.

FUNNY BALL, black marble, 11.5 in diameter, 2022, photo: Ken Kashian

Martin Art Gallery at Muhlenberg College is pleased to share a new body of work by the multidisciplinary artist Claire Lieberman in our main exhibition space. The opening reception will be on March 10, 6 – 7:30pm. Lieberman's solo show features highly polished black marble sculptures installed in a dynamic, game-like format and related cast paper prints. Her project explores the relationship between play and conflict in contemporary culture. While on campus, Lieberman plans to offer a stone carving workshop for advanced sculpture students, and additionally, the exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog, with essay by Nancy Princenthal.

Claire Lieberman is a sculptor and installation artist who combines such materials as marble, Jell-O and video. Her work explores a range of dichotomies, such as "the sublime and the quirky, desire and danger, indulgence and guilt." Lieberman is known also for her prints and sculptures of toy guns in glass. See Lieberman’s glass guns and photography in the new book, Loaded: Guns in Contemporary Art by Suzanne Ramjlak and Schiffer Publishing 2022. UDBO - Unidentified Dangerous Beautiful Objects is a book about her sculpture published with Massey Klein Gallery.

Lieberman has had solo shows at Massey Klein Gallery, NYC; Gebert Contemporary, Scottsdale; Hot Wood Arts, Brooklyn; THE LAB, NYC; Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta; PDX, Portland; Seoul Art Center, Korea; the University of Alaska, Anchorage; Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University; and Southeastern Louisiana University.

She recently exhibited in line of sight. lethal vision, mudac museum, Lausanne, Switzerland which traveled as Im Visier, to Forum Schlossplatz, Aarau, Switzerland. Her group shows include several exhibitions with Massey Klein Gallery, NYC; Mein lieber Schwan (My Dearest Swan), ACC Galerie Weimar, Germany; The Food Show: The Hungry Eye, Chelsea Art Museum; Up in Arms, Parker’s Box, Brooklyn, NY; New Prints, International Print Center, NYC; and PULSE New York with Marcia Wood Gallery.

Lieberman’s work has been written about in Sculpture Magazine, The New York Times, Whitehot Magazine, Art Critical, Glass Quarterly, Vasari 21, Two Coats of Paint, and Artist Studios Magazine. A two-page image of her sculpture, Camouflage Jell-O, was included in Camouflage, a book published by the Imperial War Museum of London and Thames and Hudson.

Claire Lieberman has received awards from MacDowell (2022), Escape to Create (2022), The Arctic Circle, Territory of Svalbard; National Endowment for the Arts; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; Friche La Belle de Mai, Marseilles, France; Künstlerhaus, Salzburg, Austria; and Yaddo. She received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and an MFA with distinction from Pratt Institute.

Click here to download the press release

Please click here to download the catalog