When decay isn’t an ending - but a second language.

By Ernst Koslitsch - artist & co-founder of Munchies Art Club
Featuring the wood sculptures of Tina Schneider, Germany

What Makes a Sculpture Feel Alive?

Contemporary sculpture is saturated with polish, perfection, and, increasingly, 3D renderings. So what happens when an artist turns to something ancient - wood - and refuses to smooth it out? When they carve not for illusion but for essence?

Enter Tina Schneider, a sculptor based in Germany, whose raw wooden figures-animal, human, ghostlike - don’t aim to impress. They aim to remember.

And in doing so, they ask something more difficult of us: Can you sit with what’s fading, fractured, and still somehow alive?

🪵 Why Wood Matters

Tina Schneider studied at the Stuttgart Academy of Fine Arts under Henk Visch, Moritz Baumgartl and Sotirios Michou.

Her chosen medium, wood, is not simply material; it’s collaborator. It ages, cracks, groans. It holds memory. It resists the artist’s will. And Schneider welcomes that resistance.

“No flawlessness, no wishful thinking of something perfect,” her work seems to say.

Her sculptures don’t erase the material’s imperfections; they accentuate them. Veins remain visible. Cuts are intentional. The viewer is not presented with a polished object, but a living surface, a breathing relic.

Themes That Echo

Schneider’s recurring motifs: twisted limbs, deer heads, plant forms, mythic hybrids, speak to a vitality that’s not dependent on youth or bloom.

She is interested in life, yes, but not the glossy kind. Instead, she sculpts the in - between moments: the gesture before disappearance, the form mid-transformation.

These aren’t ruins. They’re thresholds.

Themes in Tina Schneider’s Work:

• Vitality through decay

• Nature without idealization

• The tension between beast and human

• Imperfection as inner truth

• Material memory and presence

Contemporary Positioning: Where Tina Schneider Belongs

Tina Schneider’s work resonates in the same universe as Louise Bourgeois, Berlinde De Bruyckere, or Magdalena Abakanowicz, but with a uniquely grounded humility.

There is no grandeur here. Instead, her sculptures carry the quiet gravity of something that never asked to be seen but insists on being felt.

While many contemporary artists turn toward AI and abstraction, Schneider goes deeper into the organic, offering something AI cannot replicate: tactile truth. Her works are not just seen - they're witnessed.

This makes her a compelling voice in today’s shifting conversation around embodiment, impermanence, and eco-consciousness in sculpture.

Visual Examples (For Readers Who Want to See the Pulse)

Some recent works include:

• A humanoid form with deer-like features, carved with deep notches that suggest weathering and wear

• A plant form in decay - petals folded inward, not outward

• Limbs with just enough gesture to suggest movement, yet caught in stillness

These are not simply animal sculptures. They are gestures made permanent, each one whispering: I was here. I still am.

Author’s Reflection

As an artist, I find Tina Schneider’s refusal to flatter deeply refreshing. In an age of surface obsession, her figures offer substance. Not a spectacle, but a slow burn. You don’t scroll past them. You stay.

Her work teaches something that applies beyond sculpture:
Vitality doesn’t always roar. Sometimes, it barely breathes. And that’s enough.

Let’s Talk

Which piece of Tina Schneider’s work speaks to you most?
Do you find presence in decay—or does it unsettle you?

🪓 Follow Tina Schneider on Instagram and show her that quiet work still cuts deep.
💬 Drop your thoughts in the comments: Do we need more imperfection in art?

About the Author

Ernst Koslitsch is a Vienna-based artist, writer, and co-founder of Munchies Art Club. His work has been shown across Europe and includes commissions for the National Museum of Bosnia and the Esterházy Collection. He writes on sculpture, digital art culture, and slow aesthetics.

More Artist on our Follower List

It’s absurd. It’s hilarious. It’s grotesque.

A pile of greasy fries sprawled across the floor, bloated with excess. A half-spilled cup of noodles, tangled in chaos.

A monstrous pizza slice, its toppings bulging like unchecked cravings. But lean in—these aren’t leftovers from a gluttonous feast.

They’re meticulously crocheted.

Sabina Speich’s Crochet Giantfood is delightful and disturbing. She doesn’t just recreate food—she distorts it, exaggerates it, forcing us to confront our appetites.

These oversized, handwoven sculptures sit between humor and horror, blurring the line between indulgence and grotesqueness.

The Art of Amplification: When Scale Becomes a Statement

Speich, a Swiss multimedia artist, wields crochet—a craft tied to warmth and care—to expose mass production, fast food, and overconsumption.

Enlarging everyday edibles into cartoonish excess, she reveals our contradictions:

• How food waste exists while hunger persists.

• How we worship convenience yet crave authenticity.

• How our appetites—both literal and capitalist—are insatiable.

Her practice is rooted in sustainability. Using secondhand yarn donated by her online community, she doesn’t just depict waste—she repurposes it.

The irony? Her playful textures contrast starkly with the harsh realities of consumer culture.

Beyond Textile Art: The Politics of Play

At first glance, Crochet Giantfood is whimsical, even funny. But humor, in Speich’s hands, is a Trojan horse for critique. Her work asks: Why do we find joy in images of excess?

Fast food is engineered to be addictive—both in taste and branding.

Speich hijacks this seduction, swapping glossy wrappers for yarn, synthetic textures for soft fibers. The result? An invitation to touch, interact, and rethink our habits.

Her oversized noodles and spilling M&Ms mimic the culture of excess but strip it of its artificial allure.

What’s left is something strangely intimate, handmade, and painfully slow in a world obsessed with speed.

Why This Work Matters Now

Speich’s work sits at the crossroads of contemporary art, environmental activism, and craft.

As textile art gains momentum in the fine art world, her sculptures push the boundaries of the medium.

She taps into multiple layers of meaning:

• Material & Process: Upcycled textiles turn waste into a statement.

• Scale & Spectacle: Exaggeration forces us to reconsider the familiar.

• Interactivity: Hidden barcodes link to process videos and environmental initiatives, engaging viewers beyond aesthetics.

Her work isn’t just about food—it’s about all consumption. It’s about us.

Speich weaponizes softness. She takes a craft historically dismissed as “women’s work” and turns it into sharp social commentary.

Her food won’t rot, won’t expire, won’t nourish. It just sits there—waiting for us to reckon with what it represents.

And that might be her sharpest critique of all.

Follow Sabina Speich on Instagram
Sabina Speich on Substack

This Artist was recommended by David Rosado and Pikazer0 Art Agency Portugal.

Ruth Unger’s work inhabits the friction between aesthetic preference, personal identity, and the fluidity of social narratives.

Using the face as both a site and a symbol, she constructs a visual lexicon where familiarity is constantly shifting, inviting viewers to reconsider the frameworks through which they perceive individuality and form.

Her sculptures, paintings, and installations function as visual puzzles—fragmented, decontextualized, and yet deeply intuitive in their construction.

Not tied to any singular material, Unger embraces the chaotic dance between the ephemeral and the permanent.

Her works range from raw, gestural expressions to meticulously detailed elements that are anything but accidental.

Each piece, while a standalone entity, also operates as part of a broader, interconnected system—an expanding universe where belief systems, social structures, and intimate experiences collide and interlace.

Her practice engages in a deliberate destabilization of meaning.

The grotesque and the delicate, the humorous and the melancholic, the rushed and the deliberate—these apparent contradictions do not cancel each other out but instead create a state of heightened presence.

The act of looking at an Unger piece becomes an act of negotiation: What am I seeing? Who is this? What does it mean to recognize something, or someone, when its contours refuse to settle?

The face, in her hands, is no longer a fixed marker of identity but an evolving display—at times a mask, at times an architecture, at times a reflection of a fleeting self.

Her dark humor further complicates this terrain, revealing the absurdity inherent in how we assign value, be it aesthetic, social, or personal.

What we "like" and "dislike" dissolves in the very moment of judgment.

Her work is not simply a commentary on contemporary aesthetics; it is an active dismantling of them.

The inflationary presence of individuals, the multiplication of faces, the chaotic layering of artistic voices—Unger’s world is one in which we are constantly negotiating the terms of reality.

Through decontextualization and reinvention, she elevates the banal into the sublime, revealing, in the process, the delicate and unstable nature of perception itself.

What do you see? What do you feel? Join the conversation and explore Ruth Unger’s surreal, identity-shifting art.

Follow Ruth Unger´s Work on Instagram !

Join our open Call! Deadline 28.02.2025

More Artist to watch: Ward Foulon our previous Artist!

Domi Gratz’s artistic universe is a realm where folklore collides with contemporary anxieties, where mythic creatures roam landscapes imbued with both danger and wonder.

Born in 1994 in Vienna, Austria, and trained at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in graphic arts and printmaking, Gratz has developed a visual language that is as expressive as it is haunting.

Her works pulsate with an intense, visceral energy—each piece a tableau vivant of untamed nature, symbolic narratives, and cryptic encounters between human and beast.

A defining element in Gratz’s oeuvre is her ability to capture motion and tension, often situating her subjects within chaotic, near-apocalyptic settings.

Hunting dogs, wild girls, mythical dragons, and fiery landscapes populate her canvases, creating a sense of dynamic storytelling reminiscent of medieval bestiaries and contemporary allegories.

The rawness of her brushwork and the expressive use of color bring her figures to life, allowing them to transcend mere representation and embody something deeply psychological.

There is a performative aspect to her compositions—whales thrashing at sea, serpentine dragons with piercing red eyes, and tigers caught mid-pounce in a world of luminous foliage.

Her animals are not passive subjects; they are protagonists of an unfolding myth, engaged in a perpetual dance between power, survival, and mystery.

The fluidity of her lines suggests movement, a world in flux, while her use of textured impasto and detailed line work adds an intensity that keeps the viewer enthralled.

Gratz’s practice is rooted in observation, but it is not merely documentary—it is transformative.

She absorbs the expressive impressions of daily life and distills them into visual fables that touch upon themes of instinct, fear, and liberation.

The immediacy of her compositions is reinforced by a dynamic interplay between control and spontaneity, echoing the untamed spirit of her subject matter.

As an emerging artist, her work challenges the passive gaze, demanding active engagement and interpretation.

In an era where the digital and the ephemeral often dictate aesthetic experiences, Gratz’s paintings resist immediacy—they call for immersion, contemplation, and a confrontation with the unknown.

Follow Domi Gratz on Instagram to witness the raw power of painting and the stories of the untamed.

At first glance, Grgur Akrap’s paintings seem like fragments of a forgotten dream—figures caught between myth and materiality, dissolving into vibrant color.

But look closer, and they pulse with something deeper. His brushstrokes are feverish, urgent, sculpting light and shadow into raw energy.

Wild beasts lurk, spectral figures emerge, and the canvas feels alive with a language older than words.

Akrap is not just painting; he is invoking something primal, something felt rather than seen. You don’t just view his work—you step into it.

Visions from another realm: Akrap’s brushwork electrifies the canvas, where legends and shadows intertwine

Grgur Akrap’s paintings evoke a dreamlike confrontation between myth and materiality.

Born in 1988 in Zagreb, Croatia, and graduating in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2013, Akrap has emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Croatian painting.

His visual language, deeply rooted in the gestural intensity of past masters like Redon, Delacroix, and Titian, filters classical influences through a feverish contemporary sensibility.

Thematically, Akrap’s work delves into the arcane—his compositions summon a world of enigmatic figures, shadowed narratives, and animalistic presences that blur the line between fable and visceral human experience.

Wild beasts, spectral humans, and folkloric echoes animate his paintings, rendered in thick, tactile layers of pigment.

His palette—a dynamic interplay of intense blues, fiery reds, and earthy ochres—acts as both structure and psychological terrain, evoking heightened emotional states.

The expressiveness of his brushwork channels an urgent energy, an insistent mark-making that feels simultaneously raw and deliberate.

Akrap’s canvases do not depict fixed moments but rather flicker with motion, as if charged with a latent force.

The figures emerge and dissolve, their presence haunting yet elusive. By embracing the mythological, Akrap explores timeless existential themes: power, desire, transformation, and the primal instincts lurking beneath human civilization.

His work resonates beyond its Croatian context, situating him within the broader landscape of European contemporary painting.

Now represented by HAGD Contemporary, a Danish gallery directed by Rasmus Peter Fischer, Akrap’s international presence continues to expand.

His exhibitions across Croatia, Austria, Denmark, and Italy affirm his growing stature.

With a distinctive and assured artistic signature, Akrap’s work asserts itself as both a tribute to painting’s history and a potent force in its present.

Follow Grgur Akrap on Instagram and follow his journey