Demand’s photography has long focussed on detailed re-enactments of specific and familiar places, public or private sites often loaded with social and political meanings. The settings are made with paper and card that he photographs as the basis for his finished artworks. These life sized models are highly detailed, yet they retain subtle but deliberate flaws and anachronisms to disrupt the viewer’s comfort with the scene. The effect of Demand’s work has been to challenge any complacent assumptions about photography’s claims to verisimilitude, and to complicate conventional notions of authenticity and artifice.
Read MoreThomas Demand (*1964, Munich) lives in Berlin. Selected solo exhibitions include those at Fondazione Prada, Venice (2017, 2007), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (both 2016), Stiftung Insel Hombroich, Neuss, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (both 2015), Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (both 2012), Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2010), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and MUMOK, Vienna (both 2009), Hamburger Kunsthalle (2008), Serpentine Gallery, London, and Lenbachhaus, Munich (both 2006), MoMA, New York (2005), Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2004), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2003), and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy (2002). He represented Germany at the 26th São Paulo Biennale in Brazil in 2004.
Text courtesy Sprüth Magers.
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