THOMAS WREDE

The boundaries of staging and reality have always been in a tense relationship in Thomas Wrede’s photography. Landscapes are his main subject: here he is concerned with constructions that he seeks out in nature or that he recreates, as in his series of Real Landscapes. The former began with one of his earliest series Samsö from the 1990s: mountains of plastic sheets on the Danish island of the same name, which develop an oppressive beauty in nature in atmospheric black-and-white photography.

With his latest series of glacier pictures, Thomas Wrede takes up this aspect and finds stagings in the Alpine mountains in which man has played a decisive role. The starting idea of his glacier photography is the wrapped landscape. To counteract the melting of the glaciers, the ice is covered over large areas - temporarily or permanently. These presented stagings are an interplay of the weathered fleece covers and the visible consequences of the rapid melting of the ice caused by climate change. The artist is not interested in documenting this process - the result of his artistic examination of the glaciers are disturbingly beautiful images. As in Wrede’s earlier groups of works, the series of glacier pictures thus lies motivically between idyll and catastrophe.

The series began in 2017 with photographs taken on the Rhone Glacier in Switzerland. Here there are both exterior views ‘outside’ and interior shots ‘inside’ the glacier cave there. The weathered covers - dirty and blown away - reveal boulders and dirty snow. The morbid aesthetics of the drapery, the chosen detail and the myriad nuances of grey tones create very unique painterly motifs.

Shots from inside the glacier cave create an exciting interplay in view of the sunlight shining through the ice and the centuries-old inclusions in the ice. The fleece covers shine through the increasingly thin ice and partly break into the cave–a worrying development in recent years.

Thomas Wrede has also captured the phenomenon of ‘blood snow’ - pinkish-red shimmering algae, formed in the thawing water of the snow - on the Presena Glacier in South Tyrol in its oppressive appearance in detailed photographs, creating compositions with structures that dissolve into the abstract.

Thomas Wrede continues his glacier project and climbs further glaciers in order to capture the threatened beauty artistically.

He is represented in several group exhibitions at home and abroad on the subject of climate change in art, and his photographs have already illustrated specialist articles on the subject of glacier melt and its consequences.