The Nasher Sculpture Center will present Thaddeus Mosley: "Forest," an exhibition featuring five large-scale wooden sculptures, all made after 2015 by the still-practicing 96-year-old artist. The show originated at the Baltimore Museum of Art and was organized by Curator and Department Head of Contemporary Art Jessica Bell Brown.

Born in 1926 in western Pennsylvania, 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.

"Forest" will include an installation of related works from the collection by artists including Constantin Brancusi, Melvin Edwards, Raoul Hague, Isamu Noguchi and Martin Puryear.