THOMAS DEMAND

A new work, Memorial, depicts a make-shift shrine with various bunches of flowers, candles and small placards, heaped together around a tree on a sidewalk. At first sight bright and colourful, the scene has a somber subtext. A reminder of the frequent gun violence in the United States for which such ad-hoc commemorations often quickly form, it draws on images from Buffalo, NY—although the specific reference may be less relevant than the lamentable ubiquity of the imagery.

The exhibition includes four works from The Dailies. As do all the works from this series, begun in 2008 and printed using the nearly extinct process of dye transfer, they picture small incidents of everyday life, based on images the artist caught on his cell phone. They recall moments of drifting attention in which our gaze is briefly arrested by an object that now catches our eye. Even with little visual information—all details carefully chosen by the artist—our imagination begins to construct a scenario for these vignettes. What looks like classic photography still-life also marks Demand’s attention to the proliferation of amateur pictures shared in social media channels, or, as the eminent art historian Hal Foster puts it: ‘Certainly our shared media memory is a deep subject of Demand’s work, and The Dailies also point to a mnemonic dimension buried in the trivia of our lives.’

At the same time, ‘The Dailies’ series evokes a rich legacy of art historical iconography. Thus Daily #31 is dominated by a green surface with two deep slashes that reveal orange padding. A scene of slight dilapidation, the image can be read as an oblique reference to the work of Lucio Fontana and his “cuts,” first produced in the late 1950s. The flattened orange of Daily #33, on the other hand, can register as abstraction, while the long paper trail depicted in Daily #35 alludes both to an absent human who might have removed the excess, and an activity. Daily #36, finally, is indebted to the tradition of still-life painting. Depicting a cutting board with a knife and leftover peel from an apple, the shimmering metal blade and the soft glow of the white windowsill recall the virtuosity of competing polished surfaces in Netherlandish vanitas paintings. Incidentally, the ‘consumed’ or ‘spent’ apple also represents the final work in the series of ‘The Dailies.’

The collotype Schilf also has no apparent narrative content: tufts of reeds rising (?) from the water are a familiar sight. Yet, the image can be read as water or sky, as plants or their reflection. In a self-referential gesture, then, the work alludes to Demand’s general practice of creating works at the threshold of two-dimensional image and three-dimensional object, but also to his monumental Pond, 2020, a work in reference to Claude Monet’s gardens of waterlilies at Giverny.