Ocula Conversation Sandrine Colard on the 6th Lubumbashi Biennale The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the largest Francophone nation in Africa with vast resources and nearly 80 million inhabitants, is a place where commodities play a vital role in the national economy and the country's significance on the world stage. This is the context from which the 6th Lubumbashi Biennale (24 October–24 November...
Ocula Report From 20 to 21 July 2019, Artspace Sydney held a two-day symposium that brought artists in conversation with leading curators, writers, activists, academics, diplomats, and journalists from across Asia. The symposium was the final chapter of the 52 ARTISTS 52 ACTIONS exhibition, publication, website, and Instagram project. Instigated and...
Ocula News U.K. Election Artist Nicky Hirst Reflects on ‘Fractured and Febrile’ Campaign 13 December 2019 'Seeing the democratic electoral process in action has made me thankful for our system but even more thankful that I am an artist and not a politician,' Hirst said. Boris Johnson's Conservative Party won an overwhelming majority in yesterday's U.K. General Election despite the efforts of artists such as Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley , who...
Ocula Insight Hans Hartung and Art Informel at Mazzoleni London (1 October 2019-18 January 2020) presents key works by the French-German painter while highlighting his connection with artists active in Paris during the 50s and 60s. In this video, writer and historian Alan Montgomery discusses Hartung's practice and its legacy. Born in Leipzig in 1904, Hans...
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 currently lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles. Amongst others, solo exhibitions include Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2005, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2006, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, 2008, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2009-2010, and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2010.
Text courtesy Sprüth Magers.
Ocula Conversation Thomas Demand For two decades German-born artist Thomas Demand has captivated collectors and museums alike with his boundary pushing photography. With the dedication and single mindedness of an obsessive compulsive, Demand recreates meticulous and detailed life-size paper models of scenarios gleaned from media images, and then photographs them, blurring the...
Related Press Venice Notebook: Samplers From a Biennale Banquet The New York Times : 14 May 2017 The Biennale comprises a central exhibition, organized this year by Christine Macel, chief curator of the Pompidou Center in Paris; and 85 national pavilions, which feature solo or thematic presentations. Prizes are awarded to the best pavilion—this year it's Germany, which hosts a harrowing performance work by the young artist Anne...
Related Press Grotto installation by Thomas Demand at Fondazione Prada Designboom : 24 December 2015 Using 30 tons of grey cardboard, shaped by a computer and laid out to form a stratification with 900,000 sections, German artist Thomas Demand reproduced the rock chamber, stalactites and stalagmites of a grotto on the island of Mallorca. Demand creates huge complex environments in cardboard, photographs them and then he destroys the models,...
Related Press Making photos, not taking them; the distinction in 'Perfect Likeness' LA Times : 8 July 2015 Last year a Silicon Valley researcher estimated that more than 1.5 billion new photographs are posted every day on just the larger social media platforms, such as Facebook, Reddit and Snapchat. A new exhibition at the UCLA Hammer Museum proposes that, in response to this visually numbing fact, a distinctive strain of photography has slowly...
Related Press Sprüth Magers At Art Basel In Miami Beach 2014 5 December 2014 Ocula's photographer Charles Roussel visited the Sprüth Magers booth (L16) at Art Basel in Miami BEACH. They brought works to the fair by Bernd & Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky, Rosemarie Trockel, Michail Pirellis, Jenny Holzer, George Condo and Thomas Demand.
Related Video & Audio An Interview with Thomas Demand – The Dailies (2015) American Suburb X : 19 October 2015 In the mid 1970s, architect Harry Seidler designed a space for the historic Commercial Travellers’ Association in Sydney, Australia. In collaboration with Pier Luigi Nervi, he created a circular building that sprouts up from the street like a radiating flower. For the 25th Kaldor Public Art Project, Thomas Demand’s series The Dailies...
