Matt Browning

“All Woodcarvings Remain Slow Motion Mobiles” suggests a paradox at the center of Matt Browning’s work in wood. Objects that appear fixed and inert are in fact the result of prolonged movement—weeks of repeated cutting and carving—and remain subject to the wood’s own slow movement over time. What appears as stillness is not the absence of motion but its residue, a form temporarily stabilized through sustained physical engagement.
Since 2013, Browning has worked steadily in carving. The exhibition brings together works produced during this time, all carved in Douglas fir. All of the works take the form of chain-link carvings cut from a single piece of wood, through which interior voids, grids, and frames emerge without assembly. Rather than constructing space from separate parts, material is removed until space grows from the block itself. The resulting forms hold an ambiguous position between solid mass and open lattice, at once dense and permeable.
Each sculpture is produced through an exacting reductive process in which the same gestures are performed thousands of times, with little possibility of revision once material has been removed. What remains is not a demonstration of skill but an accumulation of decisions, a record of time made visible as structure. Though they appear motionless, the sculptures are held in a state of latent movement, capable of unfolding or collapsing despite being carved from a solid block. Installed together, they establish a measured field of relations—distances, alignments, intervals—through which carving becomes less a technique of representation than a means of organizing space and duration.
“All Woodcarvings Remain Slow Motion Mobiles” is Matt Browning’s first institutional solo exhibition and is realized in collaboration with Mies van der Rohe Haus, Berlin.
The exhibition is generously supported by the Karin und Uwe Hollweg Stiftung.

Matt Browning, “I Still Believe In Your Eyes,” 2024.
Photo: Adrianna Glaviano