10 Tree-mendous Arboreal Artworks

Beuys trees are marked by an accompanying basalt monolith. The project began in 1982, when Beuys, along with volunteers, planted 7000 oak trees and stones in the German city of Kassel. The project continued, becoming a kind of memorial, following the artist's death in 1986.

Giuseppe Penone, the Italian artist associated with arte povera, is one of the best known arboreal sculptors. In this installation he evokes the sensation of a living tree from bark-like sheets of leather and a wooden beam, which he has filled with sweet-smelling resin.

Penone even incorporates actual living trees into his sculptures. This work, Elevation (2001), has a large bronze sculpture of a tree surrounded by living saplings. As the decades pass, these trees will grow to incorporate the sculpture, creating an organic architectural form.

Alongside Penone in the arte povera movement was Mario Merz. In 1969, he created this Igloo with Tree, an architectural structure, resembling a botanical greenhouse but recalling the frigid treeless arctic, that brings together the natural and man-made.

Korean artist Do Myoung Kim meditates on the circularity of plant and human life in his 2007 work, Pot (Return Home). Out of the soil, trees grow. Later in life, they are cut down and turned into paper. Which, over time, breaks down, becoming soil once again.

When several saplings on the grounds of a hospital were to be felled, artist Michael Blazy offered to save them. He transplanted them to pots, trimmed them, and applied gold leaf, turning these young trees into art objects of desire, value, and veneration.

The late artist duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude were known for wrapping objects, from the German Reichstag to the Arc de Triomph, in plastic, but some of their forays into this unusual medium were a little smaller. In 1969, while in Australia, Christo wrapped two eucalypts.

Many people are familiar with Ai Weiwei's vast installations and provocative porcelain, but not perhaps his tree sculptures? This work, two conjoined tree stumps made in 2018 in Brazil, reflects his interest in 'readymade' art, traditional crafts, and ecological causes.

Gil Rae Lee constructs these tree-like sculptures from individual rings of metal, cut from pipes and bent into shape. They might not be natural, but these imaginative artworks represent the freedom and possibility of organic forms, from cellular structures to Giant Sequoias.

Similarly, Roxy Paine's silvery branching structures resemble the dendritic forms of nature; from the vascular and neurological systems of animal bodies, to river deltas and erosion patterns, and the tangled tendrils of tropical rainforests.