Roxy Paine’s interdisciplinary artistic practice explores the intersection of nature and technology, posing existential questions about the growing conflict between natural and manmade environments. This ink drawing is a study for a stainless-steel sculpture, New Amalgam (2017), part of his long-running Dendroid series of artificially engineered treelike forms that mirror nature but retain their industrial artifice. At first, the drawing appears to depict a simple leafless tree, but as its title suggests, the “tree” is actually an amalgam of various dissimilar branches, each having distinct physical characteristics and growth habits. Though it displays a certain sublime beauty, this fictive tree illustrates the contradiction between natural and artificial structures, revealing the artist’s ambivalent feelings about tampering with nature.
