Urban Tissue Series
Urban Tissue is part of Thilo Reich’s ongoing practice of taking imprints from the pavements of places he encounters through personal presence or historical significance. By taking silicone mouldings of urban ground, he captures surfaces shaped over long periods by use, weathering, repair and cultural influence. These textures are later cast in aluminium and assembled into relief-like collages.
The works originate from specific sites that carry meaning for the artist. Rather than documenting these places visually, Reich transfers their physical trace into a new material state. What is usually stepped on and overlooked becomes a sensitive surface, lifted from the horizontal plane and brought into a vertical presence.
The pavement is approached as a form of skin. Cracks, seams, repairs, compressions and transitions appear like inscriptions of time. In many works, different surface fragments are merged into composite structures. Separate surfaces grow into one another, forming new continuities.
Positive and negative experiences leave equal traces. What was damaged does not disappear but becomes part of a new whole. Separate surfaces grow into one another, forming new continuities. In this sense, the works allow a double reading: as urban surfaces marked by history and as metaphors for human experience, where every contact leaves an inscription and every inscription becomes part of a larger fabric shaped by encounter, memory, identity and belonging.
Through the translation into recycled metal, the transient condition of the ground is suspended into reflective permanence. The polished edges mark the precise line at which the “tissue” of the surface has been removed, emphasizing the act of taking an imprint as a deliberate gesture of preservation.
Urban Tissue can be understood as a poetic investigation of time, identity, transformation and material memory. Reich’s practice combines meticulous craftsmanship with digital processes and a deep engagement with material and place. The works do not represent the city; they resonate with it, transforming overlooked surface structures into a material archive of presence and lived history.
