Hans-Georg Wagner’s work is based in traditional media and subject matter – with a particular focus on the human figure. Through sculpture, relief and printmaking, he creates thoroughly textured and dynamic compositions of the human figure, abstracted and raw, which transcend the limitations of their materiality, while maintaining an intimate relationship to the natural form and texture of wood. The collective expressivity of surface, materiality and figure visualizes the relationship between the different materials that Wagner employs and the qualities that are retained across their variances. Wagner’s figures emerge and take shape from the splitting of a tree – through the process of opening it up and tracing its life lines and scars – and are thus rooted in the grace and wisdom of nature. Through this collaborative effort, he unearths the human form, often expressed in block-like, fragmentary articulations, by which the act of splitting the tree is echoed in the split forms themselves.

Physicality and motion of the body are prominent presences, both in three dimensional renderings and on paper, and are a consistent preoccupation of Wagner. Lines of varying depth and angles dissect figures into series of connecting segments, or – as is often the case in his bronzes – into rippling, uneven surfaces as compilations of jagged edges and smoothed-out, sinewy lines and curves. As the figures are often faceless, they do not refer to specific physicalities, as such, but to essences – of character and motion. Wagner spends time with his material – he listens to and is guided by it – and works meticulously by hand, carving out and even hand-pressing his woodcut prints. The works therefore betray the intimacy that is garnered in the process of their making.