Wood Play

From the book "Modern Finnish Sculpture" (1970) by Goran Schildt:

"During the period between 1927 and 1954, especially in the 1930's, Aalto engaged in a series of what might be described as artistic laboratory experiments, making many of the abstract reliefs and free sculptures in which he studied the variations in pliancy of wood fibres."...

" Alvar Aalto himself explains his early experiments in sculpture by referring to Yrjö Hirn. In spite of an age difference of nearly thirty years there was a warm friendship between Hirn, the distinguished and influential Professor of Aesthetics, and Aalto, who was deeply influenced by Hirn's comments on the significance of play in aesthetic creation. It is only by forgetting practical purposes in order to subordinate himself to the inner logic of his material that the artist can raise himself from the established pattern to free creation, inspired by spontaneous joy and delight in play. Aalto's "motiveless" experiments with laminated wood, aimed solely at facing problems of form and of aesthetic effect, in which the wood was bent, split, and fixed in different positions according to its grain, were acclaimed as the first wholly abstract Finnish sculpture."


Above: Alvar Aalto, various wood reliefs/experiments, 1929- 1966
Top: A fountain of Aalto chair legs from Wary Meyers' Tossed & Found. (no presumptions or pretense- our project was only about how to make the white plinth below it...)

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