Marie-Claire Baldenweg
Born in 1954.
Marie‑Claire Baldenweg is distinguished by a body of work that explicitly situates painting within what the sources term “the era of plastic”, making the plastic bag — the Plastiktüte — a central motif in her oeuvre, while adopting a painterly manner reminiscent of Pop Art in a photorealist approach.
This attention to synthetic objects is not limited to the bag: her thematic repertoire has expanded, with the sources notably citing works addressing such elements as the credit card, thereby extending her reflection on plastic materials and their contemporary symbolic associations.
In terms of exhibition history, Baldenweg has presented both independent and collective projects: the solo exhibition Carried Away at the Powerhouse Museum (Hyde Park Barracks) in 1988; the series Global Market – Bagflags of the World, shown at the Swiss Stock Exchange in 2003 and at the Sydney Stock Exchange in 2005; and participation in a group exhibition at the Haus für Kunst Uri in 2018.
The visual organisation of these projects engages an aesthetic close to popular culture and a precision of rendering that lends her images immediate legibility while referring them to contemporary material and economic realities.
The available notices place her family life in Australia, in Byron Bay, and mention her marriage to the musician Pfuri Baldenweg, as well as three children named Nora, Diego and Lionel Vincent.