image from An Idealized Scene

An Idealized Scene

An Idealized Scene is based on Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Sea of Ice, also known as The Wreck of Hope. The title of the diptych refers to an earlier title under which the painting was first shown in Prague in 1924, An Idealized Scene of an Arctic Sea, with a Wrecked Ship on the Heaped Masses of Ice.

The painting’s subject is thought to be based on an event much reported upon when it occurred in 1819: a shipwreck off Melville Island, which took place during one of the numerous expeditions into northern Canada in the search for the Northwest Passage.

Friedrich’s painting was completed in 1824 and is emblematic of the period of Romanticism, a movement that identified intense emotion—whether romantic desire, terror, awe, or outright madness—as a source of aesthetic experience. The magnitude and sublimity of untamed nature was often depicted as an embodiment of the strong emotions that the movement validated.

Romanticism is regarded as a reaction both against the rationalism of the Enlightenment period as well as the burgeoning industrialization in Europe. With the latter, modes of production and economic structures also significantly transformed.

While maintaining the painting’s original scale, An Idealized Scene very nearly replicates the exact structure and strangely geometric formation of the central iceberg in Friedrich’s painting. Yet, rendered abstract as a diagram, these forms are here made to read as a pile of books, an unwieldy and turbulent library on the topic of economy and desire, representing a current research interest.