Frozen Vanitas
Frozen Vanitas is a series of still lifes cast in ice. Athos Burez moulded the objects of the classical vanitas – fruit, flowers, everyday things – and froze them in coloured water, creating sculptures that begin to disappear the moment they are made.
view the series →
view the series →
left: detail of the installation for Quartier Kortrijk, 2025
right: frozen vanitas sculpture for VIERNULVIER, Ghent, 2026, presented in a custom-made freezer, and detail
right: frozen vanitas sculpture for VIERNULVIER, Ghent, 2026, presented in a custom-made freezer, and detail
about the series
The vanitas has accompanied Athos Burez since childhood: from his first drawings and paintings to the still lifes he admired in books, it has returned throughout his work as a theme he keeps excavating. The still life grants him time – time to explore different media, to experiment, to fail and begin again. There is a quiet paradox in this: an art devoted to transience, made through patience. And the flowers he works with bloom again each year, turning every ending into a new cycle of possibility.
Frozen Vanitas is the counterpoint to that slowness. It responds to a way of living in which everything is expected to move faster: where attention is fragmented by algorithms, and looking has been replaced by scrolling, swiping and liking.
For this series, Burez made moulds of everyday objects – the fruit, flowers and things that recur throughout the classical vanitas – and froze them in coloured water. The resulting ice sculptures exist only briefly. Within seconds of leaving the cold, their details begin to melt; flowers wilt the moment they meet warmer air. What the painted vanitas suggested through symbols – the passing of time, the fragility of beauty – here happens in real time, faster and more violently, until each form collapses into a shapeless mass and finally returns to water, ready to be shaped again.
The photograph becomes the only witness to a form that no longer exists. In this, Frozen Vanitas is less a lament than an invitation: to look attentively, and to take the time to see things before they are suddenly gone.
Frozen Vanitas is the counterpoint to that slowness. It responds to a way of living in which everything is expected to move faster: where attention is fragmented by algorithms, and looking has been replaced by scrolling, swiping and liking.
For this series, Burez made moulds of everyday objects – the fruit, flowers and things that recur throughout the classical vanitas – and froze them in coloured water. The resulting ice sculptures exist only briefly. Within seconds of leaving the cold, their details begin to melt; flowers wilt the moment they meet warmer air. What the painted vanitas suggested through symbols – the passing of time, the fragility of beauty – here happens in real time, faster and more violently, until each form collapses into a shapeless mass and finally returns to water, ready to be shaped again.
The photograph becomes the only witness to a form that no longer exists. In this, Frozen Vanitas is less a lament than an invitation: to look attentively, and to take the time to see things before they are suddenly gone.