Spotlight: Order and Entropy in Marquetry

For my seventh post featuring exhibitors in the Free Verse marquetry show at the Messler Gallery at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, I am contrasting two pieces that I think of as playing with the concepts of order and entropy. Both these pieces are ones that I was especially glad I saw in person, because their three-dimensionality can be difficult to fully appreciate in photographs.

Jack Mauch is an artist and designer based in North Carolina who makes furniture, functional household items, and sculptural pieces. His work includes what he calls surfaces made out of wood veneer, which blur the line between wall art and sculpture. From a distance, Jack’s piece #D Parquetry Study 1 is deceptively simple, a rectangular framed object with repeating cuboid shapes. However, when viewed from the side, the piece is bowed out as if someone is pushing on the veneer from behind.

William Tunberg is a California artist who specializes in marquetry sculpture, as well as furniture and portraits. He began making assemblage art in the 1960s, and after being introduced to marquetry, he eagerly incorporated the technique into his work. William makes familiar shapes and images out of marquetry, and then deconstructs and overlays them to make wonderfully complex abstract art. In his piece Segmentation, you can see hints of flowers, leaves, gears, and other familiar objects, but they have all been fractured and reassembled into a new, cohesive whole.