Levi van Veluw orders the chaos, by covering his head with square blocks of wood, as if it were a computer system board. He exorcises fears by rebuilding his boyhood room, as it began to haunt him at night in his nightmares. Hundreds of round […]

The German sculptor Ewald Mataré has gone down in art history as the maker of the forbidden cat. The extreme-right Nazis of Adolf Hitler labeled the abstract wooden sculpture as ‘Degenerate Art’. Mataré made his ‘Schlafende Katze’ in 1929. Eight years later the sculpture was

Jürgen Lingl reveals the soul of the lion, in a bust carved out with a chainsaw. Even though the sculpture remains more of a rough sketch, a living animal emerges from the wood. Jürgen Lingl knows how to bring the gaze of a lion to

Dave Harmsworth is Dutch speed carving champion. Every year he saws about a hundred sculptures from dead trees with his chainsaw. From cormorants, badgers and owls to trolls. Not to mention: the archangel Gabriel with dragon. A huge sculpture in Schalkwijk. Harmsworth only needed four

Auguste Forestier was as a psychiatric patient the most important inspiration for Art Brut. His wooden sculptures of generals, human-animals, ships and houses are now in museums and still travel the world. Thus Forestier’s dream of making distant journeys finally became reality. Auguste Forestier, inspiration

Ron van der Ende is an illusionist in salvaged wood. The artist transforms panels of only a few centimeters thick into images with an unprecedented spatial depth. It is as if his cars are driving towards you. Boats, houses and landscapes, they seem to protrude

The wooden idols from the Bible are nowhere near as well known as The Golden Calf. Yet in the Book of Jeremiah they once again aroused the wrath of God. So it stands in the book of Jeremiah, which is much more recent than Exodus.

Tapio Wirkkala (1915 – 1985) discovered the rhythm of hollowed-out plywood. The Finnish artist made a 9-meter wall from it, the ‘Ultima Thule’. But he also gave the impetus for what became world-famous Finnish design with commercial utility objects like wooden bowls and dishes for

Carl Andre (1935 – 2024) became a master minimalist by stacking unworked wooden beams on top of each other. Or arranging beams like a landscape on the floor. Andre thus created a radically new way of looking at sculptural art. He became one of the

The Italian sculptor Giacomo Manzù made more than 50 cardinals in his lifetime, almost all cast in bronze. But one special version he carved in wood, in 1945. Our writer-sculptor Jan Wolkers received lessons from Manzù. And made love in the cinema with his later