Aron Demetz (1972, born in Sterling, Südtirol) learned wood sculpture at the art school in Selva in Val Gardena from 1986 and then attended the local regional vocational school for wood sculptors, wood carvers and barrel painters until 1993. In 1997/98 he supplemented this training by studying sculpture with Christian Höpfner at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg.
Since then Demetz has had a number of international and museum group and solo exhibitions in Europe, Asia and the USA. In January 2010, he was appointed professor of sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Carrara for three years. At the 53rd Venice Biennale, his wooden figure ensemble Untitled was exhibited in the Italian Pavilion. At the 59th Venice Biennale, the artist was invited again to exhibit his works, this time in the national pavilion of Ivory Coast.
The artist's figurative-naturalistic œuvre also includes some bronze sculptures and works in marble or glass; otherwise, however, Demetz works almost exclusively with various types of wood. Roughly machine-sawn basic forms are then created from cedar, maple or walnut trunks - often the lowest part of the tree trunk also serves as the base for the life-size sculpture. After this preliminary work, Demetz uses a hammer and chisel to peel her final form out of the wood.
If such traces of work are not to remain visible, the surface is finally refined with rasps and sandpaper. It is with this "skin" of his mostly naked figures that the real work begins for him: sometimes it is soaked with spruce resin collected in the mountains (as in Uomo | Donna 2007), smeared beyond recognition (as in numerous senza titolo works created in subsequent years), or even charred by fire (as in Cinder Ella 2011 or the Burning Man versions up to 2013, of which he made bronze casts.