Artist Brings Glitch Aesthetic to Carved Wooden Sculptures

Wrap your head around Australian sculptor Paul Kaptein's warped busts, 'The Knowing' and 'The Unknowing.'

by Beckett Mufson

March 13, 2015, 5:00pm

The Knowing, Paul Kaptein. 2015. Photography by Kingsley Burton, via

Australian sculptor Paul Kaptein creates glitch-style art you'll never get on your computer. His new twin wooden sculptures, The Knowing and The Unknowing, feature the busts of two almost-identical young men. To be featured at Memories in Motion, a group show that opens on March 21 at M Contemporary in Sydney, one sculpture looks relatively normal despite the constellations dug into his chest. The other looks like he got trapped somewhere in between a teleportation device and a flatbed scanner.

Kaptein's hand-carved works are often surreal (just ask this faceless, floating cloak, or this six-armed swimmer), but The Knowing's duplicate forehead is part of a recent foray into glitch imitations that bring a physical feel to the often ephemeral genre. His previous foray into these wooden illusions featured a distorted monk called and in the endless sounds there came a pause, but this time he describes the character simply as a "wonky hipster," complete with a goatee and a man bun.