Ikaros Hjælpeløs

Thomas Mau (b.1978) is a visual artist from Denmark whose practice and course of life is inspired by literature and the inevitable coming of death. The artist has a religious approach to his works via symbols and stories. The themes he explores are often universal feelings such as melancholy, relief, and despair.

Mau notes that, ‘he doesn’t believe in God. But it is so rooted in everything we do and I really do like the stories from the Old Testament’. The artist is also influenced by artists such as Munch and the Expressionism, the writings of Dostoevsky, Celine, Nietzsche, and Rimbaud, and the works of Nick Cave.

Thomas lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.

After Alphabet

 In this series, Thomas Mau conjures a spectral echo of Inger Christensen’s Alphabet — a book of poems structured like a spell, growing through the Fibonacci sequence, incanting both the beauty of the world and its undoing. Man’s paintings unfold like haunted verses. Shapes shimmer at the edge of disappearance; colors bleed through as if recalled from memory or dream. Layer by layer, the works invoke the alphabet not only as a structure of meaning but as a fragile architecture through which ghosts pass—of language, of species, of futures threatened or lost. What remains is not illustration but apparition: a visual translation of Christensen’s logic and lament, where form becomes atmosphere, and each painting a quiet reckoning with time, language, and the inevitable vanishing.