A Screen of Trees

American vernacular woodworking techniques historically developed under conditions of economic uncertainty, shaped by both voluntarily and involuntarily unemployed craftsmen. Matt Browning (*1984, lives and works in New York) brings formal and technical elements of these traditions to bear on questions of sculpture and the structuring of space. The exhibition A Screen of Trees at Mies van der Rohe Haus presents works that, through their seriality and mutability, enter into relationships with their respective contexts in different ways, persistently and attentively. Many of the works consist of movable yet structurally interlinked chains, which Browning carves from solid blocks of Douglas fir and whose scale far exceeds the handheld objects traditionally associated with whittling. The stacks of uniformly carved links comprise a mutable architecture, allowing each sculpture to linearly stretch and compress or expand into grid-like formations, establishing relationships both among themselves and with their surroundings.

As the art historian Michael Baxandall observed in his study of German Renaissance wood sculpture, “All woodcarvings remain slow-motion mobiles”, referring to the porosity of linden wood, which continues to respond to environmental conditions such as humidity and sun exposure long after the carving process has ended. In Browning’s sculptures, this mutability at the level of material is moved up to form itself. The exhibition at Mies van der Rohe Haus reflects this logic of mutability on an institutional level as the continuation of a presentation at Kunstverein München in the spring of 2026. Two nodes in a larger chain, Each in its Isolation, Locked Together in Unity.