the spectacular Netherlands Ice Sculpture Festival in Zwolle
THIS gallery is super recent, from the Netherlands Ice Sculpture Festival in late 2023 and early 2024! And I have SO MUCH info and definitely more pics to add. Sadly, my camera wasn’t quite up to the task of capturing all of the magnificence of some of the pieces at this event. But I did the best I could! About froze my fingers 🥶 and definitely drained my battery :/
By the way, Zwolle is in the Netherlands, not too far by train from Amsterdam.
Also, mouse over the pics in the gallery to see a little info about each. Or a goofy comment. Whichever I felt like adding. And if the pic thumbnails seem a little blurry to you, you’re not the only one. That’s just the gallery plug-in doing that; the clicked on pics are much better. At some point I’m going to fix that…
random info about this gallery and the Zwolle festival
I’m not going to say this was the best ice sculpture display I’ve ever seen. That would take a while for me to decide on. But it was up there! Some of the ice was truly excellent. If you want to know how excellent, in my opinion, check out my post about the 10 best ice sculptures I’ve ever seen. I’m not going to tell you what it is and where it landed, but some Zwolle ice makes the list!
One thing that I liked about the Zwolle event (and the Eiswelt Elstal event too) was that they credited the sculptors. Many large ice sculpture displays have skipped this part in the past. When I worked on displays in Bruges, Belgium and Luebeck, Germany, none of my work was credited onsite to my knowledge. The Gaylord events too, have been very slow to credit the actual sculptors. I’ve only recently seen sculptor names listed at those events and there are no placards or signage near the sculptures. Even Moody Gardens, while I love their ice events, is bad about this :/
Below is a list of all of the ice sculptors I’m aware of that worked on the Zwolle display (in no particular order). I compiled this list by walking around and taking pics, so surely it’s an incomplete list. But it’s better than anything else I can find. I’ve also tried hard to credit the sculptors in captions and alt text. Sometimes though, I just didn’t know. My apologies in those cases.
Marieke van der Meer
Rusian Korokov
Ludo Roders
Greshem Glover
Helena Bangert
Dmitry Klimenko
Tautvilas Povilionis
Jeroen Advocaat
Jiri Genzer
Thomas Brown
Michela Ciappini
Laura Scavuzzo
Zara Gaze
Stanislav Nowodworski
Zsolt M. Toth
Atti Pedrozo
James Tottle
Slava Emelyanencko
Jussi Miettinen
Sven Morawietz
Irina Tafllevskaya
Vadim Gryadov
Martin de Zoete
Andreas Schlichting
Jaap Tichler
Karlis Ile
Ainars Zingniks
Agnese Ruditze
Sanita Ravina
Jeroen van der Vlag
Natalia Christyakova
Ferenc Monostori
Like I said, I’m missing a bunch of names here, probably at least 10? (I think I remember that there were 43 sculptors working on this event?) I’ll add more if I can find out more.
so, where was it?
Like I said, Zwolle is in the Netherlands, maybe about an hour and a half by train from Amsterdam. This was a large ice display there that has been going on at least since 2019 (see the video below), although it might have lost a year because of the pandemic.
This display ran until February 25, 2024. I have heard that this might be the last year in Zwolle, but I guess we’ll have to see. Presumably, it would resume someplace else, but that’s not always the case. Bruges, for example had a long running ice sculpture display that ended its run a few years back, never reappearing elsewhere.
this is a nice trailer, though most of the shots are closeups, so you don’t get a good sense of what the final pieces looked like in their entirety. I should be adding my own videos from 2024 soon…
still more boring stuff that nobody reads
I’m slowly working on rebuilding my collection of ice sculpture galleries, although I’ve ramped things up quite a bit recently. I had a pretty impressive collection on the old ice carving secrets site, so I have all of those and many more to add as well. Lately, I’ve been dumping photo galleries onto the site as quickly as I can. My current estimate is that I will end up with at least 7 million photo galleries on the site. Oops, I meant 60-80. But that still means I have a long way to go. As for more like this, check out the selection of galleries from icy places.
Also, you might also find photos, info, and or videos about this gallery and the Zwolle ice display on the ice sculpting secrets Instagram account or the facebook page. Since you can’t comment on this page, comment there if you have any thoughts or knowledge related to this event. Thanks!