Tree Art For Sale

About the artists

Lena Szankay creates soft, dream-like photography like her piece Impressionism. The otherworldly orange glow of the trees makes the viewer look at them with fresh eyes, as if seeing the fuzz of the pines and tangle of the branches for the first time. Domenica de Ferranti’s sculpture, The Acacia Tree also has this effect. Translated in the bronze, the tree – which is commonly found in Australia – and its branches resemble clouds, suspended in the air.

Scottish born painter Philip Maltman uses his piece After Aelbert Cuyp Road Near a River to act as a bridge between tree art of the past and artworks of today. He abstracts artist Aelbert Cuyp's neat, Italianate landscape from around 1660, dissecting the Dutch golden age painter’s vision into three parts and bringing his interpretation to life with raw, dripping brushwork.

About Tree Art

Artists have long been drawn to trees for their shapes and textures. Leading landscape artist, John Constable, layered colour to create realistic depth and volume within dense clumps of foliage and Tacita Dean’s 2006 work Majesty zoomed in on the oak’s gnarled imperfections by stripping away the tree’s background, setting it against a white backdrop and dramatically enlarging the original photograph.

Contemporary artists have also been drawn to trees due to their symbolism, as well as their shape. In the late 90s, the American photographer and sculptor, Zoe Leonard, produced a series of close up photographs of trees growing against – and merging with – fences in New York. She called them her Tree + Fence pictures. “I was amazed by the way these trees grew in spite of their enclosures – bursting out of them or absorbing them,” Leonard said of the series. “The pictures in the tree series synthesize my thoughts about struggle. People can’t help but anthropomorphize. I immediately identify with the tree. At first, these pictures may seem like melancholy images of confinement. But perhaps they’re also images of endurance.”

Shape and symbolism

More recently, as religion rates decline in western countries, trees have absorbed a new spirituality. Scottish sculptor Martin Boyce said he had been thinking about utopia when he created his three levitating trees that glowed bright white. Ai WeiWei’s 2010 Tree was less utopian, more political. Created from a mosaic of dried branches, roots and trunks taken from different tree species, the work can be read as a reference to the sometimes-turbulent relationship between the individual and society in Communist China.