Klara Liden

Klara Liden was born in 1979 in Stockholm. She studied at the School of Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm from 2000 to 2004, spent time at the Berlin University of the Arts in 2003, and completed her studies at Konstfack, the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, from 2004 to 2007. Her training in architecture informs a practice built around urban material and space: torn street posters, dumpster contents, dismantled furniture, and interventions in city infrastructure, often paired with video and live performance that place her own body inside those structures.

Early solo exhibitions at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York, beginning with Dr. 3000 in 2004 to 2005, were followed by rapid institutional recognition. She had solo presentations at the Hayward Gallery, London, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in 2007, and at the Fridericianum, Kassel, in 2009. That same year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented Projects 89: Klara Liden, her first solo museum exhibition in the United States. In 2010, she held solo shows at the Serpentine Gallery, London, and Jeu de Paume, Paris, and was an artist in residence at Artpace in San Antonio. In 2011, she received a Special Mention from the jury of the 54th International Art Exhibition (Venice Biennale). Further institutional exhibitions followed at the New Museum, New York (2012), Museion, Bolzano (2013), WIELS, Brussels (2015), and the Vienna Secession (2019).

She continues to show regularly with Galerie Neu in Berlin, Sadie Coles HQ in London, and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, with recent solo exhibitions including Square Moon (Sadie Coles HQ, 2024), VERDEBELVEDERE (Reena Spaulings, 2024), and Over out und above (Kunsthalle Zurich, 2026). A survey titled Kunstwerke opened at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, in 2026. She lives and works in Berlin.

Institutions have located Liden's work at the intersection of city infrastructure and the body, framing her recurring use of torn posters, dumpster material, and dismantled furniture as a process the Chinati Foundation describes as "unbuilding." Her early recognition, including the Museum of Modern Art's 2009 Projects series and a Special Mention at the 2011 Venice Biennale, established her among the significant artists of her generation working with performance and urban material, and continued institutional attention, including her 2026 survey at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, underscores that standing.

Klara Liden's auction record is USD 161,000, set by Untitled (Poster Painting) at Phillips New York's 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale on 16 March 2016, against an estimate of USD 100,000 to 150,000. Her broader auction history is thin and irregular, with most recorded results well below that figure, and there is no published catalogue raisonne. Because so few of her works have come to public sale, any single auction result should be read as a data point rather than a trend line.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Klara Liden, so provenance should be checked against her primary galleries, Galerie Neu, Sadie Coles HQ, and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, rather than a published scholarly record. Her market is defined less by trading frequency than by sustained museum attention, meaning collectors should weigh institutional exhibition history and collection placement heavily, and treat the limited public auction data, including the single USD 161,000 record from 2016, with appropriate caution given how rarely her work appears at sale.