Wood Carving Artists

The heads of Jean and Sophie Arp are two artworks by a pioneering artist couple. Sophie made the first, famous DaDa Head around 1919. Jean followed ten years later with Two Heads, as one of his also famous series of abstract wooden reliefs, built up from organic, colored planes. […]

Does Isamu Noguchi bend down for a soap, a posture about which many risqué jokes exist? It is a posture best avoided in communal shower rooms of prisons. However, the work is listed under a very descriptive title: Boy Looking through Legs. Does Isamu Noguchi

Richard Long built wooden circles from tree trunks, branches or from weathered wreckage wood. He collected the material for these temporary constructions in the immediate vicinity of where he exhibited. Sometimes even in nature itself. Richard Long built wooden circles from branches like this California

The African Period of Picasso did not last long, from the summer of 1907 to the autumn of 1908. But the impact on his development was enormous and led to Cubism. A wooden female figure from 1907 could just as well have been carved by

Masters of the Middle Ages. The website Wowwood.nl shows various influential sculptors from the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Among the well-known names there are also numerous wood carvers who operated from the Low Countries and what later became the Netherlands. Adriaen van Wesel carved

Louise Nevelson made monuments from found wood: assemblages of crates, chair legs, turned spindles, columns and door panels. She assembled all the loose parts into architectural installations and painted them matte black. The Centre Pompidou in Metz (France) shows her ‘monuments’ this year (2026). Rain

First primitive art, then Western art, then tourist souvenir. This is how one of the most popular wooden tourist souvenirs from Bali came full circle; that of the weeping Buddhist monk. Left the ‘Crouching Figure’ by André Derain, right the wooden ‘Weeping Monk’ from Bali.

Louise Bourgeois carved seven eggs in wood and called them ‘Gathering Wool’. That is an English expression that stands for ‘the wandering of the mind’. Daydreaming. Floating mentally. Bourgeois used this state of mind in her studio to evoke ideas. Louise Bourgeois carved seven eggs

Olafur Eliasson made a compass from driftwood, washed ashore on a beach in Iceland. He called his artwork Climate Justice Navigator. The Climate Justice Navigator (2018), a real compass made of driftwood. Since the nineties, Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson (1967) has conquered a special position

Arne Tjomsland started mass production of wooden animal figures: his polar bear souvenirs saw orders of 500 pieces at a time. Also beautifully stylized was his arctic musk ox. Not sanded smooth, but with a pattern of delicate stripes suggesting the thick fur. Thick leather