Whither Woodcarving
Mitch Speed
Installation view: Matt Browning, All Woodcarvings Remain Slow Motion Mobiles, Kunstverein München, 2026.
Courtesy of the artist and Kunstverein München e.V. Photo: Kristien Daem
The history of art and craft has become a buffet. You take what you like. You do with it what you want. Unless you count a handful of artistic technophiliacs, detournementing the tidal wave of LLMs and quantum-computing, artistic avant-gardism seems just as quaint, as the traditionalism whose destruction all avant-gardes seek. Arguably the most interesting questions about art, now, is whether the collapse of its historical evolution is depressing, or freeing, and why. So—woodcarving. Why not?
Born in 1984, like myself, Matt Browning is a man of the blade; an artist of pre-industrial means, who, thanks to our ahistorical artistic moment, feels not a second less contemporary for it. He recently showed his work at Kunstverein München, in the solo outing All Wood Carvings Remain Slow Motion Mobiles. The exhibition presented strong evidence that the answer to the above question really could be freeing. But “could” is the caveat. For old world form—whether carving, watercolour painting, thrown ceramics, or copper etching—to have emancipatory potential, it needs to exceed fetish. It needs to be given breath, legs, a pulse: either internally, within the artist’s body of work, or in conversation with its political consequence, and its peers in work.
Each sculpture in All Wood Carvings was a slight variation on the same format, involving many equal-length slats, carved with almost impossible precision from Douglas fir, and interlocking in various right-angled compositions. Several were mounted on the wall, with four slats forming a square frame-type shape, and two more making a cross form in the middle. Were a glaucoma-patient to enter the show, they might think that Browning had decorated the walls with wooden stretchers on which painters mount their canvases, in various proportions. In actuality, each sculpture is made from upwards of six wooden pieces; they are flat in the way of fenceboards albeit excised of lengthwise hollows, and interlocking with one another—like rectilinear chain links. The big reveal is that the interlocking pieces have no joints, which means that each sculpture was carved from a single piece of wood. The word “carving” evokes the repetitive scalloped form, made by a knife’s repeated path through wood. But in Browning’s sculptures, you have to squint to find this evidence of handwork. In an exhibition seemingly designed to show off this engineering feat, the sculptures had been arranged and compressed into a small handful of different configurations, from the aforementioned fully-expanded form, to versions in which the slats had been arranged face-to-face, in the way that you might stack wood to carry it under your arm, but propped on one end, like small obelisks.
Matt Browning, Perches, 2026, in: All Woodcarvings Remain Slow Motion Mobiles, Kunstverein München, 2026.
Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Buchholz and Kunstverein München e.V. Photo: Kristien Daem
Matt Browning, Beech tree, 2025, in: All Woodcarvings Remain Slow Motion Mobiles, Kunstverein München, 2026. Courtesy of Collection Dames, Berlin and Kunstverein München e.V. Photo: Kristien Daem
Detail: Matt Browning, Beech tree, 2025, in: All Woodcarvings Remain Slow Motion Mobiles, Kunstverein München, 2026. Courtesy of Collection Dames, Berlin and Kunstverein München e.V. Photo: Kristien Daem
As individual units, the sculptures are stoically modernist. Aesthetically, cognitively, and spiritually, they’re all about recursive movement: a looping relationship between thought, material, space and time, which extrapolates the motoric form of handcarving. As their form leads the eyes and the mind around and around, a viewer starts imagining themselves in the role of the carver, mustering untold focus. The technique revivifies the lost wonder of very young eyes and minds—a dimension underlined both by the mobile association of the exhibition’s title, and the fact that the sculptures seem like adult versions of the small interlocking wooden and metal children’s puzzles, which offer slightly sadistic tests of intelligence. I imagine Browning was very good at those puzzles, as a child. I imagine my child self watching him solve one after the next, struggling to contain a bubbling irritation.
He’s also less one-dimensional than this exhibition suggested. Wooden sculptures aren’t the only trick in the Browning bag. There are also these delicious little cubes of hard translucent plastic, in various gemstone-like colours, and none too big to hold in the palm of one’s hand. It’s hard to understand why these pieces weren’t shown in Munich, since they give dimension to his involvement with material and process, and display a rare imaginative thrill, characteristic of people who think, “What would happen if I do this ridiculous thing?” but then do exactly what the rest of us usually avoid and actually try to find out. He made those plastic sculptures with a heat gun, shrinking bottles to their smallest possible form, before depositing the resultant nugget of chroma-rich plastic in another bottle, and repeating the process on ad-infinitum in a 2025 series known as Plastic Freedom. Eventually, these little gleaming objects appear, at once entirely novel, and chatting with figures from the history of sculpture. Amongst them is the Canadian Eric Cameron, who has spent a life layering coats of white gesso on miscellaneous objects, absurdly and beautifully, to the point that they appear as ancient monster molluscs, lost in limestone. Still, a Browning fan might leave the exhibition wishing, as I did, that he would pursue his inventive curiosity with more promiscuity.
This work’s embeddedness in process sparked another question. Since the white cube gallery is anyway just a quasi-religious absurdity that we all continue to accept, for lack of other options, the problem arises of where art like this really belongs. In the carefully orchestrated photographs he made of his Paris studio, Constantin Brancusi—the Romanian ur-carver of geometric repetition who must surely occupy Browning’s pantheon of influence—provided evidence that the workshop is just as much the native space of art as the exhibition space. The phenomenological and material fireworks that take place in the former, are at least as dynamic and impactful as those which materialise, or fail to materialise, in the latter. Given this, it may well be that the shortcomings of this show had to do with a poor fit between its core purpose: the scintillating game of imaging a form and the meditative process of bringing into the world—and the institution’s nature.
Those shortcomings came into view when the artist Naho Matsuda and I found ourselves mired in a shop-talk vortex. At first we were fascinated and energised by the enigma of these forms, and Browning’s maniacal attention. But frustration soon settled in, as the puzzle of their making came to feel like a surrogate for experience. Only the most hardened intellectual-supremacist would deny that execution is a worthy subject of conversation. But it’s also a line of inquiry that could be sparked by any one of these sculptures, placed in a room, alone, without need for multiple variations of the same, in disguised permutations. It would be petty to fault an artist for repeating himself (economic survival is an understandable concern). But a Kunstverein is not a showroom, and one of this exhibition’s primary effects was to place more weight on this single sculptural conceit than it could reasonably carry. That’s a recipe for frustration.
The role of handwork, at this moment in history, is a subject exponentially worthy of attention. It’s also a subject that gathers into its fold no shortage of artists, who tend to the interchange of hand, muscle, nervous system, material, and time. All of which suggests the lost possibility of a more challenging exhibition, that would’ve integrated Browning’s work into a discussion about craft’s role in a post-machine-learning world, or, for that matter, the displacement of guild-structures by a neoliberal fantasy of isolated human brilliance.
That such an exhibition would have posed a curatorial risk, is sort of the point. Lavishing exclusive real estate on a single artist is fun and fancy. But the lavishing has to deliver experiences and revelations, whether through a rare glimpse of a career-corpus fully-bloomed (too early for Browning), or a body of work possessing some kind of undeniable binding interior force—whether poetic, dialogic, narrative, or so relentlessly repetitive as to produce the hypnotic inertia of mystic chants. That Browning’s work offers tremendous potential isn’t remotely in question. But this show resigned that potential to remain just that. It did so through something like curatorial myopia, transfixed by a single object, a single gesture, and because of that intense focus, vision-starved.
Mitch Speed is a writer based in Berlin. His book on Mark Leckey’s video artwork, ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore,’ was published by Afterall Books in 2019.