Matt Browning at Kunstverein München

Since 2013, Matt Browning has worked steadily in carving. All Woodcarvings Remain Slow Motion Mobiles brings together works produced during this time, all carved in Douglas fir. Each sculpture takes the form of a chain-link carving 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 occupy an ambiguous position between solid mass and open lattice, at once dense and permeable.

The sculptures are made entirely through subtraction. Cavities are opened, channels are extended, and connections are left intact until interlinked volumes appear within the original block. The structure that emerges is therefore inseparable from the material it is carved from. The sculptures do not represent chains or lattices; they become them through the continuous carving away of wood.

This reductive process is exacting and largely irreversible. The same gestures are performed countless times, with little possibility of correction once material has been removed. Working through a technique closer to whittling than to conventional sculptural carving, Browning gradually pares away the wood through small, controlled cuts, allowing complex structures—each unique—to emerge through the cumulative repetition of simple gestures. What remains is not simply a demonstration of skill but an accumulation of decisions: a record of time made visible as structure. Each work condenses weeks of repeated cutting and carving, the prolonged encounter between body, tool, and wood gradually stabilizing into form.

The exhibition unfolds across both freestanding and wall-mounted works that develop the same chain-link structures in different spatial registers. While the freestanding sculptures articulate carving as volume moving through space, the wall works extend the same vocabulary laterally across the wall. Seen together, the two forms reveal a continuous sculptural logic: one operating through mass and interval in the room, the other through expansion across the architectural surface.

All Woodcarvings Remain Slow Motion Mobiles points to a paradox at the center of Browning’s work. What appears as stillness is not the absence of motion but its residue: motion temporarily held in place. Their chain-like structures hold the possibility of articulation, with each element able to pivot in relation to the next. Yet this movement never occurs. Instead, the works remain suspended in a condition of balance, where the potential for motion is present but held in equilibrium within the carved block.

Douglas fir plays an active role in the logic of Browning’s sculptures. Widely used as a structural timber for its strength and stability, it offers both resistance and direction to the carving gesture. Its pronounced grain determines where pressure can be applied and where the material might split. At the same time, the wood records its own growth: each ring marks a year of expansion, embedding duration directly into the material. Even after carving is complete, the material continues to change. Exposure to light gradually deepens the wood’s color from pale tones toward warmer amber and reddish-brown hues, while subtle expansions and contractions respond to shifts in humidity and temperature.

Installed together, the sculptures establish a measured field of relations—distances, alignments, and intervals that shape the viewer’s movement through the space. As one moves around them, apparent flatness gives way to depth, interior structures emerge and disappear, and the sculptures continually shift in orientation and balance. They are neither purely autonomous objects nor parts of a larger fixed structure; rather, they form a spatial constellation in which each work subtly affects the perception of the others. Voids align across the room, chains echo one another’s rhythm, and densities of carving shift from one sculpture to the next. As such, carving becomes less a technique of representation than a means of organizing space and time.

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.