Claudia Märzendorfer
* born in 1969, lives in Vienna and works in the Praterateliers.
Märzendorfer studied at the Academy of Fine Arts from 1994 to 2001 and graduated in sculpture under Bruno Gironcoli. In the 1990s, she began working with casts made from frozen water/ice, a material that has accompanied her to this day. It lends the sculpture a performative character and expands it to include the dimension of time. The disappearance of the object brings the process as the only constant function of existence into the focus of perception and emphasizes the importance of space and memory. In her work with other materials, Märzendorfer repeatedly refers to this processuality by placing the process of creation at the center of attention. Over the course of eight years, for example, she produced handmade replacement parts for a truck in original size, Spare Parts, Motor (Silent Running); These sculptures represent the socio-political aspect of her work in particular; she understands this work as a private protest.
The artist sees the world as material and understands sculpture as a poetic, expanded concept of form. She works with installations, film as sculpture, photography, drawing, sound, and text. Her works pursue a conceptual rigor and are often executed in simple black and white. Claudia Märzendorfer works with analog techniques in the digital age, archives, and creates site-specific installations and (temporary) sculptures, often in connection with acoustics. Ice Machine, Fast Instrument. (2025) was the latest work in this series at the interface between sound and space.
With the work frozen records- much ado about nothing (2005), she was invited to be Artist in Residence at Tesla am Podewils’schen Palais in 2006. In 2012, with the support of the Arnold Schönberg Archive, the artist developed the work “musictypewriter” from Schönberg’s patent file into a music typewriter, made out of ink-ice. In 2018 and 2019, she created films based on the practice of live acts in the cultural history of instrument destruction in the 20th century.
Her practice deals with ephemeral sculptures and installations. She understands time and music as the only neutral currencies. With her works, she creates a shift in the world alongside the world in order to escape social constraints. This is also the driving force behind her work.
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Her works have been shown in numerous solo exhibitions: Neuer Kunstverein Wien (2024/2025), Kunsthaus Mürz (2020), MQ ART BOX (2020), Kunsthaus Wien (2019), OK Linz (2019), KM-H Graz (2016/2017), MSU Maribor (2016), Bildraum Bodensee (2016), etc.
In 2019, the artist was invited to the Zentrum europäischer Künste Hellerau (Center for European Arts Hellerau) in Germany. For the Wien Modern festival, she developed an installation of the same name, The Mushroom Book (2018), on loan from the “Mushroom Book”, John Cage Trust New York, and showed the ongoing project Frozen Records Archive at Wien Modern (2020/2021).
Her works were shown in exhibitions at “singuhr.de” Berlin in 2006, 2018, and 2024, and in the following group exhibitions and festivals, most recently: Albertina Klosterneuburg (2025), Lentos Kunstmuseum (2025), 50 Years of Künstlerhaus Bethanien (2024), Albertina Modern (2024), Sounding Bochum (2022), Kunstverein Mannheim (2020), Chongqing Galaxy Museum of Contemporary Art/ GCA (2019), Frey Art Museum Seattle (2015), Today’s Art Festival Den Haag (2007);
She is represented in numerous collections and her concepts have been implemented in art in architecture/art in public space projects, such as the ongoing project: für die Vögel/for the Birds (2019), forthebirds.at. Claudia Märzendorfer has recently been awarded the following prizes:
2023 Prize of the City of Vienna.
2017 Gerhard and Birgit Gmoser Prize of the Jury of the Vienna Secession.
2014 Outstanding Artist Award in the field of fine arts.
2010 State Scholarship for Fine Arts.