GLEN WEXLER

FLIGHT OF ICARUS (2001)

​

Dimensions: 62 x 42 in.

Edition: 7 + 1 AP

Medium: Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Metallic

Frame: White box frame, 8-ply museum matte with museum acrylic

Price: $11,800

​

Flight of Icarus reimagines the classical myth as an act of escape. Suspended between sea and sky, a human figure with mechanical wings breaks away from a looming labyrinth-like structure—part fortress, part machine, part monument to institutional power. The image centers on a charged threshold between confinement and freedom, where risk becomes the price of self-determination.

​

Rather than illustrating the myth only as a cautionary tale, the work reframes Icarus as a figure of resistance: vulnerable, exposed, and in motion, yet committed to flight beyond systems of control. Its silvery atmosphere and cinematic scale heighten the drama, while the physicality of the body keeps the image emotionally immediate.

​

The resulting tension—between ambition and consequence, myth and modernity, spectacle and psychological intimacy—gives the work its enduring force. What is staged is not simply ascent, but passage through a liminal zone in which liberation and peril remain inseparable.