Clemens Weiss


Clemens Weiss is a German artist living in the United States.

Youth and Education

Clemens Weiss grew up in the Region of the Lower Rhine Valley where he received technical training in mechanical engineering from 1970 to 1973. From 1977 to 1982, he studied art, philosophy, medicine and geology in Krefeld and Düsseldorf. Beginning in 1974, he also worked as an independent artist. In 1983 he moved to the small town of Süchteln in Germany in order to concentrate on his own philosophical and visual work. Since 1986 he has maintained a studio in Mönchengladbach in Germany and, in 1987, moved to New York where he established his main studio and residence.

Work and Projects

Weiss is represented by the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York and had his first exhibition there in 1988. Since then, he has exhibited in galleries, art foundations and museums, often in conjunction with lectures and panels, and has shown many other art, theater and public sculptural projects in the United States and in Europe. Clemens Weiss has also acted as curator of large transatlantic arts and media projects, including a project for the German publication Juni, that consisted of an exhibition in Germany of specially-created print editions by New York artists in 1991.
He is engaged in international cultural exchange to oppose the large dangers threatening mankind. His sculpture Regarding Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapon was permanently installed in 1996 at the Palace of Nations in Geneva, as an official present from the Federal Republic of Germany to the United Nations. The sculpture consists of a group of steles with forty-two handwritten texts related to international nuclear treaties and covers the complexity of the nuclear age until 1995, the year the sculpture was finished.
Weiss investigates, and attempts by means of Installation and other groups of works, to bridge the different disciplines of art and philosophy. His installations are transparent glass constructions that often contain drawings, text, paintings, and objects and he uses a similar technique in his theater productions.
Clemens Weiss lives and works in New York City.

Individual exhibitions (selection)

Clemens Weiss has works in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Folkwang Museum, Hamburger Bahnhof, New York Public Library, Pushkin Museum, Palace of Nations, University of South Florida, Von der Heydt Museum and Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford.