Wood Carving Artists

Giacometti dreamed of a palace at night, at 4 o’clock in the morning. Influenced by other surrealist artists he constructed a fragile structure of wooden rods with abstract wooden sculptures inside: a female figure, a skeleton of some kind of flying dinosaur, a bowl with […]

Asmundur Sveinsson designed the chairman’s gavels of the UN and NATO. What’s more: the gavels are identical. Mark Rutte is the fourth chairman from the Netherlands to open NATO meetings with this ‘hammer of Thor’. Both gavels have already been hammered to pieces. At his

Ellsworth Kelly created spiritual totem poles. Not like the First Nations of the American west coast with bird figures, but completely abstract in form. With a slight curve he gave the wood some movement, giving the artwork something natural.  This wooden ‘totem pole’ ‘Untitled’ by

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.