MagazineThis New York Artist and Designer Is Pushing the Limits of WoodworkingAaron Poritz melds tradition and technology to create his gestural works

By Hannah Martin

Photography by Nicole Franzen

January 18, 2022

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Aaron Poritz in Brooklyn with pieces bound for his show at Cristina Grajales Gallery (cristinagrajales.com). 

Trees have been a lifetime muse for the New York–based artist and designer Aaron Poritz. “This piece was made from a 200-year-old oak that fell in Connecticut,” he says of the sinuous stool on his worktable during a recent Zoom from his Brooklyn Navy Yard studio. But a run-of-the-mill woodworker he’s not. To achieve the amoeba-like form, he created a ceramic maquette, digitally scanned it, and programmed a robot to carve its three-dimensional contours (scaled up) from a timber hunk—all before sandblasting its surfaces for a rough-hewn finish. “I like to explore how textures can tie back to the original material,” he says of the final, hand--finished result, part of his upcoming solo show, “Big Woods,” at New York’s Cristina Grajales Gallery, opening January 27.

Having grown up in Western Massachusetts with a sculptor for a father, Poritz recalls that “there was always a woodshop nearby.” Early projects like tree forts and coffee tables as gifts for “girls I liked” paved the way to architecture school at California College of the Arts. His first official furniture collection, in 2012, was made during a stint in Nicaragua using trees that had fallen during Hurricane Felix. Later projects included a series of exquisitely crafted tambour furniture.

Arm stool in white oak.

Inseparable mirror in ash.

Youthful Mistakes stool in charred white oak. 

His most recent body of work marks a conceptual turning point for Poritz. Spanning cocktail tables, desks, mirrors, and more, the biomorphic pieces (he calls them “abstractions of human forms”) take inspiration from, say, the proportions of an arm or the gesture of a hand. They each use either the aforementioned robotic milling process or stack lamination (both techniques championed by his creative kindred spirit Wendell Castle) to achieve unusual but still very functional shapes. “He understands how wood behaves, and knows exactly how to work with it,” says Grajales, who has steered Poritz in a sculptural direction since he joined her roster a little over three years ago. “He’s able to take ancient techniques and make them current.” poritzandstudio.com