Thomas Demand

Thomas Demand (born 1964, Munich, W.Ger.) is a German photographer known for his large-scale photographs of paper-and-cardboard reconstructions of indoor scenes. On initial viewing, the images appear to portray “real” settings, but closer inspection reveals that the scenes have been entirely fabricated. Through calculated illusion, Demand has striven to overturn the notion of photography as an inevitably objective, or “truthful,” medium.

Demand grew up in West Berlin and attended the Academy of Fine Arts (1987–90) in Munich and the Düsseldorf Art Academy (1990–92) before receiving a master’s degree in fine arts from Goldsmiths College (1994) in London. He initially focused on sculpture, using photography to document his paper-and-cardboard reconstructions. In 1993, however, photography and sculpture traded places in his artistic process; the photograph became the “end product,” with the sculpture providing a means to that end. Demand’s subsequent sculptures were created specifically to be photographed. Working in front of a camera, Demand built three-dimensional indoor scenes from coloured paper and cardboard, using as models images drawn from personal memories and, more often, photographs found in the mass media.

Humans are absent from Demand’s photographs, but evidence of human activity abounds in them. Staircase (1995) represents the artist’s memory of the stairwell in his childhood school. Barn (1997), one of a number of works evoking artists’ workshops, was inspired by a photo of the studio of American painter Jackson Pollock. The most prominent of Demand’s works are those based on media photographs representing politically charged or otherwise sensational events. Corridor (1995) depicts the hallway leading to the apartment of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Poll (2001) makes reference to the disputed ballot count in the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Kitchen (2004) reconstructs the kitchen in the hideout of Ṣaddām Ḥussein, former president of Iraq, before his 2003 capture.

Through their suggestion of human presence, their realistic artificiality, and their provocative subject matter, Demand’s artworks aim not only to draw viewers into the illusion but also to underscore the role that photography plays in cultivating illusion. To reinforce the status of the photographic image as illusion, Demand destroys his paper-and-cardboard models after they have been photographed.

After 1992, when he had his first solo exhibition, at the Tanit Gallery in Munich, Demand showed his work at major museums and galleries worldwide, including the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain (2003–04), the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (2005), the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyōto (2006), and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto (2007). In 2009 he collaborated with the London architectural firm Caruso St. John to create “Nationalgalerie,” an exhibition highlighting major events in Germany since 1945. “Nationalgalerie” opened in September 2009 at Berlin’s New National Gallery, marking the anniversaries of the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany (1949) and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall (1989). In 2010 the exhibition traveled to the Boymans–van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.