Biography
Clemens Behr (*1985, Koblenz, Germany) is a Berlin-based artist whose work moves between sculpture, installation, architecture, and painting. He studied graphic design at Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts before completing his studies in sculpture at the Berlin University of the Arts. Behr lives and works in Berlin.
At the centre of his practice is an interest in the material, spatial, and social conditions of the built environment. Behr creates large-scale installations for both interior and exterior spaces, responding directly to the specific architecture, history, and use of a site. His works are often conceived as temporary interventions: structures that enter an existing space, alter its orientation, and make its overlooked characteristics newly visible. Rather than treating architecture as a neutral backdrop, Behr approaches it as an active material—one shaped by construction, repair, adaptation, neglect, and everyday use.
Working with wood, metal, found objects, recycled materials, and ordinary building supplies, Behr constructs spatial arrangements that appear at once precise and improvised. Beams, panels, supports, fragments, and surfaces are assembled into unstable-looking constellations that interrupt familiar paths of movement and perception. These constructions can resemble temporary repairs, unfinished building sites, makeshift shelters, or artificial ruins. They refer to the visual language of urban infrastructure and construction work, while simultaneously resisting straightforward functionality.
Although his installations strongly foreground physical material and construction, Behr also understands them as a form of painting. Colour, surface, composition, layering, and perspective play a central role in his work. His structures create painterly situations in space: they frame views, compress or extend depth, produce unexpected alignments, and turn architectural fragments into abstract compositions. In this sense, his work portrays fleeting moments found in transitional urban spaces—moments in which materials, repairs, and improvised solutions reveal their own visual and poetic logic.
Behr’s practice is characterised by a productive tension between order and disorder, stability and fragility, planning and accident. His works evoke what might be called a “time out of joint”: a condition in which temporary measures become permanent, construction remains visibly unresolved, and the built world appears both functional and precarious. Through this constructed fragility, Behr invites viewers to reconsider familiar environments and to notice the aesthetic, social, and historical traces embedded in their material fabric.
His work has been presented internationally, including at the Lyon Biennale (2022), as well as in solo exhibitions at Gallery Punta, Sofia (2024), Hidari Zingaro, Tokyo (2019), and Kanya Kage Artspace, Berlin (2023)
Archive records · BUNA vol. 4 / 2026
Retrofit—to add new parts, equipment, or technology to something older after it has already been manufactured or built.
In the twentieth century, aluminum became an important part of architectural modernism. White window frames, aluminium and PVC, were particularly popular. They provided transparency, efficiency, hygiene, and industrial precision at an affordable price. Their modularity suited large-scale building and mass-housing systems.
It was once believed standardized construction could provide an ordered, improved form of collective life, but reality shows buildings seldom remain as planned. Over time, windows, balconies, roofing, and entrances become sites of adaptation. Frames are being replaced, doubled, extended, enclosed, insulated, repaired, or combined with shutters, colored glass, timber, PVC, blinds, and even found materials. A balcony becomes storage, a workshop, a winter garden, an extra room, or a buffer against the weather. These additions adapt to the needs that architects did not plan for—the unpredictable demands of everyday life. They act like add-ons, upgrades, prostheses, or improvised enhancements in dystopian cyberpunk cityscapes that peaked in '90s cinema. The building or housing complex becomes a surface of continuous recalibration—a collective system adjusted through individual decisions, domestic engineering, repair, and available materials.
The result is neither failure nor disorder. It is a form of resilience—an ongoing negotiation between formal architecture and lived reality. These windows are caught in this contradiction: they are a material of permanence that still appears provisional; a result of standardization that enables an escape from the standard through the standard itself. The frames hold the remains of a modern future while making visible the many ways that future has been modified, improvised, and made habitable.