Thomas Demand, in full Thomas Cyrill Demand, (born 1964 in Munich, Germany[1]) is a German sculptor and photographer. He currently lives and works in Berlin[1] and Los Angeles, and teaches at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg.
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Thomas Demand is known for making photographs of three-dimensional models that look like real images of rooms and other spaces.[2] He thus describes himself not as a photographer, but as a conceptual artist for whom photography is an intrinsic part of his creative process.[3] Having studied sculpture under Fritz Schwegler at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf alongside Katharina Fritsch and Thomas Schütte, Demand began his career as a sculptor.[4] In 1993, he began to use photography to record his elaborate, life-sized paper-and-cardboard constructions of actually or formerly existing environments and interior spaces, and soon started to create constructions for the sole purpose of photographing them. The photograph he takes of this model with a large-format-camera is the final stage of his work, and it is only this image that is exhibited unframed behind Plexiglas, not the models. On the contrary, Demand destroys his “life-size environments”[5] after he has photographed them. One notable exception is his large scale model for Grotto (2006), inspired by a postcard of a Mallorcan grotto Demand has never visited, which was later exhibited.[6] According to art critic Michael Kimmelman, "the reconstructions were meant to be close to, but never perfectly, realistic so that the gap between truth and fiction would always subtly show".[7]
The subjects represented in Demand’s photographs often relate to pre-existing press images showing scenes of cultural or political relevance.[8] The hotel room in which L. Ron Hubbard worked on Dianetics, for example, was the starting point for Zimmer (Room) (1996).[9] Drafting Room (1996) is inspired by a photograph of the studio of Richard Vorhölzer, the architect who was in charge of much urban planning for postwar Germany; Barn (1997) is based on a Hans Namuth photograph of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in Pollock's East Hampton studio.;[10] Studio (1997) derives from a photograph of the 1970s television set for the German "What's My Line?"; Kitchen (2004) is based on soldiers' snapshots of the compound where Saddam Hussein was captured. Demand's series Yellowcake (2007) portrays the Nigerian Embassy in Rome, the site of a burglary in January 2001 that was used to prove Hussein’s attempt to purchase uranium.[11]
Commissioned by The New York Times, Demand's “Presidency” series depicting the Oval Office appeared on the cover and inside The New York Times Magazine, November 9, 2008 issue following the election of President Barack Obama. The series was created in the last weeks of the Bush presidency and later acquired by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in 2009.[12] In 2011, Demand created Metzlersaal (2011), his largest site-specific work to date. Commissioned by the Städel Museum, the photographic work appears as if the museum’s main hall is lined floor to ceiling with deep purple curtains. Demand was inspired by the drapery depicted in many of the Städel’s Old Master paintings.[13]
Because Demand is working from models, the absence of people in his photographs is "conspicuous and thematic".[14] The closest Demand has ever come to depicting people are the cut-out silhouettes of politicians and heads of state depicted in the picture frames arranged on Sir Edward Heath’s grand piano (Flügel/Grand Piano, 1993).[15] Furthermore, every trace of language has completely vanished: the papers strewn across the work table and floor in Büro (Office) (1995) have no text on them; the labels next to the doorbells that are the subject of Hinterhaus (2005) are variously colored but bear no names.[16]
Demand cites Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha as sources of inspiration.[17]
Demand has also experimented with film in works such as Tunnel (1999), a tracking shot from a driver’s perspective through an empty tunnel lined by concrete pillars; the tunnel is modelled on the Paris underpass where Princess Diana died.[15] Recorder (2002) is a 35 mm-film loop in which a paper model of an eight-track reel-to-reel recording device appears to play the Beach Boys album Smile (1966), a recording that was until recently lost;[18] the sound of a piano playing a variation on ‘Bicycle Rider’, an instrumental from the Smile sessions, can be heard on the soundtrack.[15] Rolltreppe (Escalator) (2001) is an animation of 24 still images shown in a continual loop.[19] Showing an escalator without people, taken from surveillance footage, Demand here is referencing an escalator near Charing Cross Bridge in London where a gang was caught on surveillance camera shortly after they had robbed two men and thrown them into the Thames, killing one of them.[15] Trick (2004) refers back to the beginnings of cinema and is based on one of the first films of the Lumière brothers, Assiettes tournantes (Turning Plates) of 1896. The film re-creates a sequence in which a performer executes a stunt by spinning a set of bowls and plates on a tabletop.[20] In Rain (2008) Demand has painstakingly re-created the effect of raindrops falling onto a hard surface.
In 2010, the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco entrusted Demand with a role of guest curator for “La Carte d’Après Nature”, the opening exhibition[21] of Villa Paloma, Monte Carlo. A modified version of this exhibition, which used Surrealist painter René Magritte as its theme, later travelled to Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.[22] From October 2010 to June 2011, he was a Getty Scholar.[23] In 2011, Demand curated a selection of postcards of grottoes from the collection of Gerhard Stein – a computer engineer from south Germany who has amassed over 50,000 postcards of grottoes over his 30 years of collecting – for the Nottingham Contemporary, filling each cabinet with multiple images of subterranean spaces.[24]
One of his long-term collaborators is British architectural firm Caruso St John, which most notably designed his 2004 exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, and has also contributed to the design of the Nationalgalerie show. Demand and Caruso St John won a competition in 2008, launched by the city of Zurich, to redesign the Escher Wyss Platz; however, the project was rejected in a public referendum in 2010.[25]
Caruso St. John also worked on Thomas Demand's 2009 exhibition at Berlin's Mies van der Rohe designed Neue Nationalgalerie, where an installation has been purpose-built specifically for the show. The Berlin-based culture magazine 032c dedicated its 18th issue to Demand in honor of this mid-career exhibition. The publication featured both interviews by and with Thomas Demand, including a conversation between the artist and film director Todd Solondz.[26] Demand has also been a frequent contributor and feature in the magazine, for instance in the form of a 2008 interview with fellow artist Collier Schorr.[27]
Demand’s Berlin studio occupies part of a warehouse alongside the Hamburger Bahnhof. He used to share this workspace with Tacita Dean and Olafur Eliasson.
In 2011, Demand was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.[28]
Since his first solo exhibition, at Tanit Galerie in Munich in 1992, Demand has shown at numerous international galleries and museums. Demand represented Germany at the Bienal de São Paulo in 2004. That same year, the Kunsthaus Bregenz mounted the first comprehensive presentation of Demand's major works from 1994 till 2004.[29] Demand's work later was the subject of mid-career retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2005 [30] and at the Neue Nationalgalerie in 2009. Other solo exhibitions include Serpentine Gallery (2006), London, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, the Fondazione Prada, Venice (both 2007), and the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris (2001). Demand participated in the Shanghai Biennale (2006), in the Venice Biennale (2003), the Sydney Biennale (1998), and the Carnegie International(1999/2000). His work has been included in "New Photography" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1996), "Elsewhere" at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh (1997), "Great Illusions: Thomas Demand, Andreas Gursky, Ed Ruscha" at Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, (1999), "Moving Pictures" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2002 and 2003), and "The Constructed Image" at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto (2007). Demand’s work is in numerous collections worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Guggenheim, New York, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Tate Collection, London.[31]
Demand is represented by Sprüth Magers in Berlin/London, Matthew Marks in New York, and Helga de Alvear in Madrid.[32]
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2000 - 2001
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