3D-printed relief art: Michelle Larsen sees turning point in spatial design

US artist Michelle Larsen is restructuring her work, which has so far been primarily gallery-focused, and is increasingly turning her attention to 3D printing and scalable spatial concepts. For 2026, she expects dimensional wall creation and 3D-printable sculptural elements to make greater inroads into shopfitting, hospitality and film sets. Instead of smooth surfaces, relief, depth and tactile impact are moving into the foreground, which can be directly linked to large-format additive manufacturing technologies.

Larsen is best known for her “3D Paper Sculpted Painting” technique, in which paper-modeled structures protrude several centimeters from the canvas. These physical originals increasingly serve as the starting point for digital workflows: first, hand-formed one-of-a-kind pieces are created, which are then captured via 3D scanning or depth mapping and processed as data sets for large-format 3D printing or industrial relief production. In this way, complex surfaces can be generated for modular wall panels, acoustically effective elements or decorative sculptures that can be reproduced in series production.

“Dimensional art is beginning to shape the next design cycle,” Larsen says. “Demand is shifting toward texture and form, and my work has lived in that direction for over fifteen years.”

“Design teams and retailers are actively looking for what’s next,” says Clara Whitmore, Public Relations Director for Michelle Larsen Studios. “Michelle’s dimensional originals offer exactly that: a new visual language positioned for commercial scale.”

The combination of an analog, artistic starting point and digital post-processing gives designers in 3D printing the opportunity to translate organic, emotionally charged motifs into standardized components.

The combination of sculptural originals with 3D-printable data sets provides precisely this language – and creates an interface between art, parametric design and additive manufacturing. For the 3D printing sector, this opens up another application area in which artistic quality and reproducible production directly coincide.