Oscar Kargruber
Rebecca, 2025
Limewood, carving
29 x 21 x 73 cm
Ohne Titel (swarm), 2025
Watercolour on hardboard, wood, acrylic
200 x 120 cm
Ohne Titel (man and bird), 2025
Pencil on paper, glass, wood
22,5 x 15,5 cm
Courtesy the artist
Oscar Kargruber (b. 1999, Sulzrain, Germany) is currently studying sculpture at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. His practice spans drawing, painting, and sculpture. His visual worlds seek to capture a specific atmosphere, one that makes moments of the uncanny and the ambiguous perceptible through essential forms.
For And This is Us 2025, he has created a wooden sculpture staged with elements of abstract painting and drawing. The sculpture depicts a human figure, upright and striding forwards, emerging from a thicket, grasping plants in its hands. Its gaze seeks ours. The expression is ambiguous, enigmatic, the mouth slightly open. The sculpture seems to capture a frozen moment in time—a gesture halted in motion and held in wood. Yet in its unresolved tension, it resists definitive interpretation.
Kargruber describes his subjects as intuitive moments that emerge through drawing and from personal memories. In their symbolism and formal qualities, they reference works from art history, literature, and film. In his sculptures, he searches for a primal quality in form—for the strange, the manic, the authentic, and the passionate.
Karl Blossfeldt’s early modernist close-up photographs of plants serve as a visual source for Kargruber’s carved thicket. He is fascinated by the diversity and formal rigour of Blossfeldt’s magnifications, which produce a totemic and almost threatening kind of beauty. Kargruber translates these into aesthetic elements within his sculpture.
In his practice, Kargruber approaches, almost methodically, the depiction of atmospheric tipping points—moments when beauty threatens to turn into something uncanny, where the lines between good and evil, beauty and danger begin to blur. He seeks this sense of ambiguity. Is the figure under threat, reaching for the plants for support? Or is it itself a threat, hiding in the undergrowth, clutching the foliage with force?
His training as a master wood sculptor enables him to apply his virtuosic skill in carving delicate, intricate forms from solid blocks of wood. The wooden figure is spatially expanded by two wall pieces: an abstract painting made up of dotted colour points describing a spiral movement, and a small pencil drawing showing a figure in profile holding a seed between their lips, which a bird grasps with its beak. Kargruber sees these images as energy made material—gestural traces that make the field of force surrounding his figures perceptible.
Oscar Kargruber draws inspiration from sculptural traditions of both antiquity and modernity. The power of frontal representation found in Greek and Egyptian sculpture, as well as in Etruscan art, resonates within his visual language. He is drawn to reduced forms that allow only the essential to remain. In his work, Kargruber is not interested in naturalistic depiction. His treatment of volume and anatomy is stylised rather than idealised. The silhouette of the body, in its linearity, is universal. It rejects gendered attributes and individual characteristics—yet the gaze remains central and is rendered with great expressiveness. With his timeless and raw aesthetic, Kargruber stands as a representative of a contemporary approach that consciously distances itself from dominant modes of current artistic expression.
Oscar Kargruber (b. 1999, Sulzrain, DE) has been studying sculpture at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main (DE) under Prof. Tobias Rehberger since 2022. Prior to that, he studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe (DE) from 2021 to 2022. Between 2016 and 2021, Kargruber completed an apprenticeship as a master wood sculptor at the Städtische Berufs- und Meisterschule für das Holzbildhauerhandwerk in Munich (DE). In his work, he focuses primarily on traditional artistic techniques such as sculpture, painting and drawing. While his motifs are usually created in intuitive moments, their symbolism and formality consciously build up references to art history, literature and film.
Kargruber has presented his work at the following institutions: Piktogram, Warsaw (PL), Galleria Fuocherello, Turin (IT), Halfsister, Berlin (DE), Delphispace, Freiburg (DE), Kornhäuschen, Aschaffenburg (DE), Art Basel in Paris (FR). Since 2024, he has been a scholarship holder of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes.
