Thomas Demand Eis, 2025

Thomas Demand's Eis / Ice suggests an expansive icy landscape. Created from stacks of paper which were then shaped into the creviced forms and lit to emphasize the glistening white of the snowy top surfaces, Demand's work is both clearly an image of nature but also clearly constructed. It is a tension found often in the artist's treatment of the found imagery which is at the root of most of Demand's works. The subject of Eis / Ice, its almost topological view of an endangered landscape, is topical with its reference to climate change and the diminishing ice cover on the earths poles. At the same time, the work evokes the long tradition of landscape painting, especially one of the most iconic images, the famous painting by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), Das Eismeer from 1823/1824.