Philippe Parreno’s ‘Iceman’ Sculpture Will Melt Away at Independent 20th Century

The iceman cometh—to the Breuer building.

Later this month, Philippe Parreno’s iconic Iceman in Reality Park (1995–2023) will make its New York debut, courtesy his gallery, Esther Schipper, which will show it at Independent 20th Century.

“The beautiful idea with the ‘Iceman’ series is that it can be reproduced as many or as few times as desired,” Leah Turner, the gallery’s New York–based senior director, told ARTnews.

The booth also marks Esther Schipper’s debut an Independent fair. The gallery, which has exhibition spaces in Berlin, Paris, and Seoul, opened an office and showroom in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood around two and a half years ago and has begun beefing up its US presence. “The idea is that it could mark a special event or a celebration,” Turner said of the newest iteration of Iceman.

When the gallery first proposed showing Iceman in Reality Park in all its melting glory, Elizabeth Dee, Independent’s founder, recalled asking, “How are we going to do it? What are the considerations and the context of supporting a work that’s melting?” But ultimately, there wasn’t a doubt that they would want to bring the work to the fair: “We embraced it.”

Parreno first made Iceman in Reality Park for a 1995 group exhibition, titled “Ripple Across the Water,” in the Tokyo neighborhood of Aoyama. Organized by late Belgian curator Jan Hoet, the exhibition was staged in different outdoor areas of Aoyama. Parreno’s sculpture was installed in the private park of the Kirin Brewery Company, and each day, just before the workers took their lunch, a fresh ice sculpture would be delivered.

The show was staged during the summer, and Parreno liked that the sculpture would melt during the day. “I wanted to create a work that conveys time without involving any technology – like a metronome,” he told Frieze in 2020. “In the current moment, I thought it made sense again for people to come to a gallery and see something melting.”

Then, 25 years later, Parreno recreated the work for his 2020 solo exhibition “Manifestation” at Esther Schipper’s Berlin space. For that iteration, Iceman was placed on a plinth that collected the melting water. Instead of being replaced daily during the exhibition’s five-week run, a new ice sculpture would come every few days, with the embedded stones and branches becoming all that remained of the work in some cases. In 2024, the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul showed another version, made in ice mixed with soil at smaller scale (around 3.15 feet tall, including the plinth, which had a metal grate this time around).

At Independent, Iceman in Reality Park will be realized in white or clear ice, at similar size as the Leeum version. Each day of Independent, a new Iceman will arrive. “The Iceman can be reproduced as many or as few times as desired,” a description of the forthcoming iteration reads. “The ice sculpture does not need to be continually installed; the empty plinth is also a manifestation of the work.”

The work will also have prime positioning at the fair, as it will be installed on the Breuer building’s fourth floor, which will feature the fair’s two largest booths, for Esther Schipper and for Marian Goodman Gallery. (Both stands will have an L-shaped configuration, made up of two 50-foot walls, as opposed to a traditional box shape as is common at most art fairs.)  

“We positioned this project in the center of the fair, in the center of the fourth floor, which is which has the biggest Breuer window and is the most dynamic of all the spaces,” Dee said, noting that the window will allow natural light to directly shine on the sculpture. There, visitors will “encounter this melting sculpture that will change over time and give you a sense of what it means for something to decay over that period of four days.”

When the gallery began discussions with the art fair about its participation, they wanted to think about how the booth could show “the historical positioning of the gallery,” Dee recalled. The focus would be on the artists who helped shape the gallery’s program in the 1990s, particularly their connections to the relational aesthetics movement. In addition to Parreno, the booth also features work by Liam Gillick, Pierre Huyghe, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Angela Bulloch. “This core of conceptual artists is what the gallery built itself on and what we became known for, so we thought that it would be a great way to showcase the gallery in New York as a sort of outreach,” Turner said.

“We have just enough distance from that period to think through the nature of those questions that were being asked are,” Dee said. “I feel like a lot of the questions—about mode of display, what constitutes an artwork, how does the audience activate [a work] through the participation, how does an exhibition actually become the artwork—were so prescient in the ’90s in many ways. For that to be so linked to the history of the gallery is super exciting to explore further.”