Thaddeus Mosley: Forest

Thaddeus Mosley: Forest - May 13, 2023 - August 20, 2023

For six decades, Thaddeus Mosley has taken felled trees near his home in Pittsburgh and transformed them into inventive abstract forms to create large sculptures, five of which are presented in Forest.

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ABOUT THADDEUS MOSLEY: FOREST
Born in 1926 in western Pennsylvania, Thaddeus Mosley has been making carved and joined wood sculptures since the 1950s. Largely self-taught, the artist works with arborists and local sawmills in the Pittsburgh area to find felled trees which he sculpts using mallets and chisels. Rather than meticulously planning his sculptures in advance, Mosley roughly chalks out lines on the surface of logs and then begins hand-chiseling and carving. This improvisational process yields surprises. Solid, monumental forms bend and stretch, revealing themselves as cavernous and delicate. Disparate parts of the sculpted timber are joined into unexpected, cantilevered combinations forming abstract compositions. From each vantage point, his commanding forms and life-size scale explore space, human existence, and our relationship to nature.

Among Mosley’s inspirations are European modernist sculpture, the art of African diasporic communities, and the syncopated, soaring freedom of jazz. The large, biomorphic works are made intuitively from walnut, with the chisel revealing the musical motion of the artist’s hands. Mosley, a former jazz critic, regularly associates his art to music, referencing such jazz greats as Thelonious Monk and Art Tatum in titles like Off Minor and Tatum Scales.

Thaddeus Mosley: Forest is curated by Jessica Bell Brown, Curator and Department Head of Contemporary Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

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CREDITS
Kayla Oudthone