© 2016 Your company
Danywood is a collaborative studio and author-driven project founded in 2017 by Daniil Ivanov and Aleksei Korolkov.
Daniil Ivanov has been working in artistic and documentary photography for over 30 years. Alongside this practice, he received a scientific education in biochemistry (Saint Petersburg State University and Utrecht University), followed by studies in art history at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts, including an icon painting program. This interdisciplinary background — at the intersection of science, visual thinking, and the history of form — defines the working method of Danywood.
The project emerged from an attempt to rethink the language of Bauhaus and the Soviet avant-garde in small forms — as if architectural structures were brought into an intimate, interior scale. We are not interested in decorative design, but in form as construction: a spatial element governed by the internal logic of material and structure.
The project emerged from an attempt to rethink the language of Bauhaus and the Soviet avant-garde in small forms — as if architectural structures were brought into an intimate, interior scale. We are not interested in decorative design, but in form as construction: a spatial element governed by the internal logic of material and structure.
We work exclusively with unique, solid cross-sections of valuable wood species, characterised by complex, marble-like internal structures. The choice of material is fundamental: each piece is singular and does not allow replication. In the creation of free forms, improvisation plays an essential role — the grain of the wood often intervenes in the composition rather than submitting to a predefined scheme.
A key part of Danywood’s practice is the development of proprietary technologies. In particular, this includes work with end-grain sections and their stabilisation through vacuum microwave chambers designed by Daniil Ivanov and Aleksei Korolkov. These solutions made it possible to work with massive solid forms previously considered technologically unstable.
A distinct direction of the project lies in the integration of photography and wood. Photographic thinking — work with series, rhythm, fragment, light, and pause — directly informs both the formation of objects and the ways they are presented. In several projects, photography and wooden objects function as equal elements within a single artistic statement.
In 2022, the project was relocated from Russia to France. Today we live and work in Paris. Danywood exists not as a commercial brand, but as an authorial practice in which material, form, technology, and biography form a unified whole.
