Thomas Demand

Thomas Demand (*1964) is one of the foremost contemporary German artists. His singular oeuvre merges sculpture and photography and usually relies on found images. The artist, who lives in Berlin, painstakingly reconstructs the found photographs as three-dimensional, usually life-size models made of paper and cardboard before expertly lighting and photographing them with a large-format camera. The models are destroyed once the work process is complete. The result is an uncanny, hybrid image, both a document of the artist’s process and a reconstruction of a pre-existing reality. Demand sees himself first and foremost as a sculptor. His feel for the essence of things, virtuosic mastery of the material and insight into the dramaturgical and atmospheric effects of light often make his works appear deceptively realistic at first glance. And yet the longer you look, the more the illusion is dispelled, a process heightened by the absence of any human presence and a characteristic lack of such representational details as brand names, lettering or surface textures. Instead, closer inspection reveals traces of pencil marks, remnants of adhesive tape, and creases in the paper, exposing these photographs as pictures of paper dummies. A great deal of Demand’s work could be characterized as an investigation of the visual unconscious of the media age. Many of the sculptures he has created and photographed are based on photographs showing peripheral scenes of consequential media events, such as the bathtub in which German politician Uwe Barschel was found dead in 1987 or the East German State Security Service office, which was stormed in 1990 following the collapse of the GDR. The cinematic perspective of these photos gives viewers the feeling of being right in the middle of these events. And yet they fundamentally refuse to be appropriated by the usual narrative fictions of history. They are nothing more than phantom-like flashbacks that—with their empty spaces, erasures, and missing details—already have the visual quality of fading memories. They indelibly impress themselves on viewer’s psychological landscapes, where images of real experiences and media simulacra are continually fused.