Mies van der Rohe Haus presents from Sunday, 13. September 2026 (Opening: 12.09.) the exhibition A Screen of Trees by the artist Matt Browning. 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 shows works whose seriality and mutability embed them within their contexts in different registers, through both insistence and reactivity.
Image above: Detail: Matt Browning, Beech tree, 2025. Photo: Kristien Daem.
Much of the works are comprised of movable yet structurally interlinked chains carved from solid blocks of Douglas fir, a whittling technique sized up to room scale. The stacks of uniformly carved links make up a mutable architecture, allowing each sculpture to linearly stretch and compress or expand into grid-like formations, thereby creating syntactic connections between themselves and 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 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.
A Screen of Trees at Mies van der Rohe Haus is curated by Dennis Brzek and was realized in collaboration with Kunstverein München, where the exhibition All Woodcarvings Remain Slow Motion Mobiles was on view from 21 March to 31 May 2026. In the context of that show, a catalogue was published that was co-produced by Mies van der Rohe Haus. Edited by Tom Engels, with contributions by Rhea Anastas and Matt Browning.
WHEN?
Opening: Saturday, 12. September 2026, 4 – 9 pm
Artist Talk with Matt Browning (in Englisch): Sunday, 13. September 2026, at 4 pm
Exhibition period: Sunday, 13. September 2026 until Sunday, 10. January 2027
Opening hours: Tuesday – Sunday: 11 am – 5 pm
Special opening hours for Berlin Art Week: Sunday, 13. September 2026, 10 am – 6 pm
WHERE?
Mies van der Rohe Haus
Oberseestraße 60
13053 Berlin
COSTS?
Free entry
