Roxy Paine New York, NY, USA, b. 1966
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Roxy Paine is an American conceptual artist whose work investigates the complex relationship between the natural world and industrial systems.
Lives and works in New York
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His practice unites meticulous craftsmanship with a conceptual rigor that questions how human ambition reshapes organic processes and environments.
Educated at Santa Fe College (New Mexico) and Pratt Institute (New York), Paine began his career in the early 1990s, co-founding the artist collective Brand Name Damages. His early installations and machine-based works brought him recognition on the international exhibition scene.
Throughout his career, Paine has examined the paradox between human control and natural growth. His extensive body of work includes art-making machines that automate the creative process, polymer casts of plants, hyperreal wooden replicas of tools and industrial objects, and large-scale wooden dioramas depicting human-made spaces — laboratories, fast-food restaurants, or airport security zones — reimagined as sites of reflection.
Among his most renowned series are the monumental stainless-steel tree sculptures. These intricate, hand-welded forms translate the logic of natural growth into mechanical precision, merging the vitality of organic structures with the rigidity of engineered design. Installed in public spaces, Paine’s trees form a dialogue with their surroundings: their polished surfaces mirror sky and city alike, while their branching forms echo the nervous system, electrical circuits, and the architecture of thought itself.
“I take this organic majestic being and break it down into components and rules.”– Roxy Paine
Paine’s work has been presented in major international exhibitions and is held in prominent museum collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Brooklyn Museum (New York), The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA, Los Angeles), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York). -
Works
Roxy Paine New York, NY, USA, b. 1966
Defunct, 2004Stainless steel13,6 × 5,5 × 5,5 mFurther images
Roxy Paine’s long interest in the juxtaposition of nature and industrialization has brought form to an extensive body of work. From his mushroom and plant fields to his art-making machines...Roxy Paine’s long interest in the juxtaposition of nature and industrialization has brought form to an extensive body of work. From his mushroom and plant fields to his art-making machines and large-scale metal trees, Paine continues to see nature through an industrial prism.
Through work that combines the organic with the manufactured, he questions our position between the man-made world that we control and nature’s world that we do not.
Defunct is a 42-feet-tall stainless steel sculpture of a dead or dying tree infiltrated with fungus. The trunk and limbs have deteriorated from disease or old age. The beauty of the once daunting, vibrant tree is shadowed by the growing rot and shelf fungus. The death of the tree has given life to the fungus.
Defunct, a meditation on loss and life, describes the symbiosis between industry and earth, between production and natural selection.
Exhibitions
Roxy Paine: Three Sculptures. Madison Square Park, New York, May 15–Dec 31, 20072/ 2
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