About
Clare Celeste Börsch is a German-American artist based in Berlin. Her artworks and installations have been exhibited at Homo Faber in Venice and the American Museum of Natural History in New York, commissioned by Cartier during Art Basel Miami, and featured in The Guardian, FAZ, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle and Oprah Magazine. She is the 2027 Martin Shallenberger Artist-in-Residence at Cheekwood Estate & Gardens. Through her studio, she creates installations worldwide for luxury houses, museums, publishing houses and cultural institutions, including Chanel and New York Magazine.
Börsch celebrates biodiversity in a time of ecological crisis, holding the tension between exaltation and mourning. She works with natural history plates from the 1800s, sourced from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, to bring endangered and extinct species into light. These images carry a double history: they record the beauty of the living world, but they were also made in the service of colonial expeditions. Raised in Brazil and now based in Europe, Börsch works within this duality, using the colonial record to question how we value, relate to and exploit the natural world. Above all, her work is a love letter to the living world and a call for its protection
She is the founder and Creative Director of Clare Celeste Studio.
Photo by Sabine Bangert
Selected Exhibitions
2028 – Restorying, Skopje 2028 European Capital of Culture, Natural History Museum of North Macedonia
2027 – Martin Shallenberger Artist-in-Residence, Cheekwood Estate & Gardens, Nashville
2027 – Public commission, NYC School Construction Authority Percent for Art, Brooklyn
2026 – An Island of Light, Homo Faber, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice
2026 – Viriditas, Kunsttage Winningen
2026 – Papier perFormt, Galerie Handwerk, Munich
2025 – Web of Life, in Impact, American Museum of Natural History, New York
2025 – Into the Wild, commission for Cartier, Miami
2025 – Incandescence: The Chandelier in Contemporary Art, CUNY, New York
2024 – SichtbarSEIN, Embassy of Mexico, Berlin
2021 – Making Paradise, Aga Khan Centre, London
Biography
Börsch was born in 1982 in Thailand and grew up across Brazil, the United States, Italy, Honduras and Argentina. Her Mexican-American father was a professor of Latin American History at Indiana University and later a U.S. diplomat and her mother was a textile artist. Her earliest memories are of Brazil and its lush, humming ecosystems: the ocean, the rivers, the rainforest, and the electric blue of Morpho butterflies. Today, research shows that this blue is fading as forests are cleared and biodiversity dwindles. Her recent work turns to the Morpho as a symbol of beauty, resilience and loss.
Börsch holds a BA in cultural anthropology, focusing on Latin America through a postcolonial lens, and a Master’s in environmental policy from UCLA and went on to work in U.S. federal government and public arts administration before becoming an artist. Her background shapes a practice that is as much about research and inquiry as it is about craft, asking how we relate to the natural world.
Now based in Europe, close to the archives where so much of the world’s natural history was gathered, Börsch works with these images and their troubled past. Cutting them apart by hand and rebuilding them is her way of looking again, and of giving them new meaning.
Through Clare Celeste Studio, her Berlin-based team of assistants and production partners, Börsch creates site-specific environments for museums, cultural institutions, public spaces and luxury houses, bringing the richness of the natural world into unexpected settings.