Jennifer Krasinski
Twelve sculptures by the artist present a spirited balance
between weight and levity.
Thaddeus Mosley: Proximity, installation view. Courtesy Karma.
Thaddeus Mosley: Proximity, Karma, 549 West Twenty-Sixth Street, New York City, through May 23, 2025
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Love isn’t a tenable critical position, and, most of the time, I think that’s exactly as it should be. Love makes us corny, blurs our edges, and (the worst fate for a writer) induces hyperbole. Yet there are occasions when a critic, so moved by an artist and their art, is made corny, feels the blurring of their edges, and tries to recompose the oncoming hyperbole into a more respectable rhapsodic form, all while squirming at the thought of maybe, just maybe, having to use that word. Alas, until I find a better one (I’ve still got 800-plus of them to figure it out before I hit this column’s limit), I will simply confess: I love Thaddeus Mosley’s sculptures.
Thaddeus Mosley: Proximity, installation view. Courtesy Karma. Pictured, far right in back room: Arboreal Choreography, 2023.
He had me at Arboreal Choreography (2023). A debonair sentry, it stands at the fore of Proximity, an exhibition of twelve new pieces by the artist, at Karma. Now ninety-eight years old, Mosley still carves his sculptures by hand from various woods: walnut, cherry, sassafras, applewood, locust, maple, and others. He doesn’t bother with delicate branches or slivers of old, dried trees but rather begins with heavy, green trunks, selecting them not purely for their potential to become works of art, but rather for the artworks they inherently possess. As Mosley once explained, “I can look at a log and see a sculpture in it.” One of the most oft-repeated stories from the Western canon recounts how Michelangelo took his chisel to a great hunk of irregular, discarded marble and begat his very perfect David. The lesson: sculpture is a product of both will and release, the hand asserting itself to free an idea, an ideal, a form, or even an energy stowed inside of nature.
Thaddeus Mosley: Proximity, installation view. Courtesy Karma. Pictured, right: Arboreal Choreography, 2023.
“Your work should move, it should levitate, it should dance,” Mosley used to tell his students, instruction that is exquisitely modeled in Arboreal Choreography. A balancing act, the piece looks as though it’s composed of limbs, those on the ground working in tandem to hold the others aloft. As is true of many of the sculptures on view here, its scale invites viewers to delight in their own movements. Walk around, crouch down, occasionally stand on tiptoe: like the trees they were born from, Mosley’s works are to be taken in from all sides and angles. At a distance, the eye absorbs their sum-total shapes and dynamics. For example, the spiraling column of Curvilinear Reach (2024) looks as though it could continue all the way to the ceiling, save that Mosley bisects it, blunts it, then tops it with a kinked piece of wood that recalls an axe stuck in a stump. The effect? A seductive tension: the sculpture’s divine upward momentum is now met, countered, by a downward force, its weightiness infused with a feeling of levity.
Thaddeus Mosley: Proximity, installation view. Courtesy Karma. Pictured, left to right: Khari’s Bird, 2025; Donnenberg Spheres, 2025; Curvilinear Reach, 2024.
Up close, the sculptures’ surfaces come alive, as Mosley’s gouge and chisel run both with and against the grain, which, in the case of Donnenberg Spheres (2025), underscores its formal radiance, its feeling of efflorescence. The stocky base resembles a mushroom that’s freshly erupted from a forest floor, on which Mosley has perched two thick cross sections of gold-colored locust wood, one atop the other. They crack and bloom from their centers, their wavy edges soft and open. Created in a similar spirit, Suspended Petal (2025) is a single slice of locust wood balanced on its side, its presence absolutely floral, delicate, and quivering.
Thaddeus Mosley: Proximity, installation view. Courtesy Karma. Pictured, left to right: Khari’s Bird, 2025; Donnenberg Spheres, 2025; Suspended Petal, 2025.
Born in 1926 in rural New Castle, Pennsylvania, Mosley has resided in Pittsburgh for seven-some decades, having supported himself and his family by working for the US postal service. Despite living at a remove from the cities touted as central to American culture, the artist nevertheless steeped himself in art, music, and dance. “I remember Charlie Parker saying you have to live the art or it’s not going to come out of your horn,” the sculptor has said. To that end, Mosley filled his home with works by friends, peers, and even by his children, now grown with children of their own. He began collecting African tribal art in the 1960s, revering the ingenuity of those artists, the complexity of their abstractions, which predated by centuries its “invention” by Western artists. “Without West Africa, there would be no Cubism,” Mosley chuckled in a recent interview. He often speaks of his lifelong love of music, most particularly jazz, citing Parker, Ornette Coleman, and his friend Ahmad Jamal as among the many giants who have brought him great joy.
Thaddeus Mosley: Proximity, installation view. Courtesy Karma. Pictured, left: Flight Form, 2023. Right: Suspended Petal, 2025.
Although Mosley says that jazz has not overly influenced his practice, he has referred to his works as “sculptural improvisations,” allowing for the unexpected discoveries he makes (and receives) during the process of creation and for the fact that wood, perhaps as much a collaborative force as it is a material one, can have a mind of its own. “People always ask me, ‘What are you working on now?’ And I always say, ‘I’m doing the same thing, trying to make it look a little different.’ ” Same theme, different takes—the artist’s humble description calls to mind a jazz riff. Here, Mosley offers variations on the theme of flight. The sublime Khari’s Bird (2025), a muscular, oversize splinter of walnut spouting from a small sassafras dome, is like a response to the calls of Constantin Brâncuşi’s impenetrable Maiastra (1912?), and, perhaps most directly, to his gracefully arcing Bird in Space (1923). Both artists defy their materials—bronze and marble, in the case of Brâncuşi—so that their earthliness, their groundedness, seeds thoughts of soaring, of sky (though it’s nowhere in sight). Mosley’s Flight Form (2023) is a tour de force, momentous rather than merely monumental. Whether feather or foot, its topmost carving conjures (in my mind) Hermes, god of flying, of speed. Standing there, enrapt, I was filled with oxygen and held in place by that other time-based, collaborative, improvised art form: love. Perhaps that’s why there’s no other way for me to say it.
Jennifer Krasinski is a writer, critic, and editor.