Since 2025, Florian Tomballe has expanded his sculptural practice through a series of unique hand-carved wooden sculptures. Working directly in timber has introduced a different tempo to his process, one in which the gesture of carving, the resistance of the material, and the visibility of the maker’s hand become inseparable from the final form.

Blond Boy (2026) belongs to this recent body of work. Rather than revisiting antiquity through quotation, Tomballe draws upon the structural clarity of archaic sculpture, translating its enduring principles into a distinctly contemporary visual language. The simplified facial planes, frontal composition and rhythmic organisation of volume evoke memories of Cypriot and early Greek sculpture, yet remain entirely his own. The visible grain of the wood reinforces the work’s material presence, allowing history and material to coexist without hierarchy.

Unveiled here for the first time, Blond Boy reflects an important development within Tomballe’s practice, where carving itself becomes a means of thinking. The sculpture does not seek to reconstruct the past, but to reactivate its formal intelligence through reduction, balance and quiet monumentality.