Mies van der Rohe Haus

13 September 2026 – 10 January 2027
Opening: Saturday, 12 September, 4–9 pm

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 seriality and mutability of his work embed it within its contexts in different registers, through both insistence and reactivity.

Much of the works in A Screen of Trees 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. Taken together, the carvings become a set of distinct yet comparable units that can be composed like words onto a space, creating syntactic connections between themselves and their surroundings.

The carvings are accompanied by a new work, The Concept H͟o͟u͟s͟e (2026), which is constructed by stacking layer upon layer of Western red cedar into stepped pyramid forms, which are then combined to produce a larger volume. In a near inversion of the reductive process of carving, this work instead emerges through a ploddingly additive process of layered construction covered by a thick, luminous cap of shellac.

The titles Browning gives to his works and exhibitions often draw on terms developed within art history to delineate relationships between materials, form, space, and artistic activity. A Screen of Trees denotes a compositional strategy employed throughout 19th century landscape painting in which painters positioned trees in the middle ground of a landscape to partially conceal the view of the deeper background. Its use here suggests a persisting, and contestable, epistemic relationship between foreground and background in art. 

Each work in A Screen of Trees faces outwards, suggesting a reversal of the perspectival logic of the Mies van der Rohe Haus’ architecture, whose windows emphasize views out onto the surrounding landscape. The 1932/33-built bungalow, though exceptionally simple in its execution, represents an argumentative pinnacle of modernism’s celebratory appropriation of nature. Landscape is framed and integrated through custom-made gridded windows which formally emulate the visual language of industrial mass production. By suggesting viewership from the outside in, the works’ arrangement allows the threshold of the window frames and the yard extending towards the park beyond to protrude into the viewer’s field of vision, opening up A Screen of Trees that is both beheld and beholding.

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.

Curated by Dennis Brzek

Mies van der Rohe Haus is a Partner of Berlin Art Week.

Please note that the exhibition is shaped by the changing conditions of natural light. In November and December, we will adjust our opening hours in response to the time of sunset.


• Floor plan [PDF, 712 KB]

Saturday, 12 September
Matt Browning: A Screen of Trees
Opening
4:00 – 9:00 pm


Sunday, 13 September
Berlin Art Week 2026: Extended opening hours
10:00 am – 6:00 pm

Artist Talk with Matt Browning
4:00 pm
In English


Sunday, 22 November
Guided tour of "Matt Browning: A Screen of Trees"
with Dennis Brzek (Director of Mies van der Rohe Haus and curator of the exhibition)
1:00 pm

In German. Free entry, no registriation required.


Sunday, 13 December
Guided tour of "Matt Browning: A Screen of Trees"
with Alina Rapp (Research associate, traineeship)
1:00 pm

In German. Free entry, no registration required.