Thomas Demand

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Thomas Demand (2011)

Thomas Demand (* 1964 in Munich ) is an artist who recreates crime scene and press photos in great detail from paper in order to then photograph them. These “second” photographs will then be exhibited after the model has been destroyed . He studied in Munich , Düsseldorf and London and has been a professor at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg since 2011, majoring in sculpture with a focus on photography. He lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles .

Exhibition form

Demand exhibits life-size photographs, which, thanks to their low hanging, allow access to the pictorial space. He also makes analog animation films (35 mm).

Working method

After a photographic template or from memory, Demand builds a model out of paper and cardboard. This model is created either (mostly for interiors) on a scale of 1: 1 or (for external representations of large architectures) in the size that the subsequent photograph should have. The resulting life-size photographs are then the final works of art .

Depicted

Demand often uses older newspaper images as a template . Signs of the event shown are systematically eliminated in the built model; likewise the people present in the original photographs. Nevertheless, the content of the image remains so distinctive that the subject can be clearly identified if the photographic source is known. The pictorial themes presented are socially relevant events, which nonetheless often contain a personal reference to the artist.

His understanding of art

Demand does not see himself as a photographer, although this is his exhibition medium. At the same time, however, he is also not exclusively a model maker, since the focus of his artistic work is on photographic reproduction, so that he is best understood as a reproducer of the media or as an illusionist .

Demand used to be concerned with sculpture , but then switched to cheap materials, mainly paper, cardboard and cardboard. So he could build his models in a day and therefore throw them away again without any problems. In order to document the resulting but quickly ephemeral sculptures, he began to photograph them.

Works and crime scene

  • Tunnel (1999) recreates a tracking shot through the tunnel in which Diana Mountbatten-Windsor died.
  • Bathroom (1997) is a re-enactment of the photography that went around the world in connection with the death of Uwe Barschel .

Other works

The extension of the Lenbachhaus in Munich, which opened in May 2013, is adorned with blue Lenbachhaus lettering in front of the gold-colored facade, for which Demand combined an old font from the 19th century with a modern one.

Awards

Solo exhibitions (selection)

Group exhibitions (selection)

curator

In 2016 he curated the exhibition L'Image volée at the Fondazione Prada in Milan with works by 60 artists from 1820 to the present day.

Films via Thomas Demand

  • Playing with memory - the world of images of Thomas Demand. Documentation, Germany, 2011, 26 min., First broadcast on arte: June 12, 2011, script & director: Jeremy JP Fekete , production: rb / arte, summary by arte, nominated for the 21st German Camera Prize 2011, category: Documentary / Documentation "Editing", table of contents (PDF file; 274 kB) from Deutscher Kamerapreis, trailer on YouTube .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The golden reconciliation. In: FAZ , May 8, 2013, page 25.
  2. ↑ Thomas Demand receives the Great Art Prize Berlin 2018. In: Website of the Academy of Arts. January 16, 2018, accessed March 23, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Villa Massimo | Thomas Demand. Retrieved August 21, 2019 .
  4. ^ Thomas Demand. May 19 - June 8, 2012. Website of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (English).
  5. ↑ Thomas Demand - September 18, 2009 to January 17, 2010, Neue Nationalgalerie. SMB website .
  6. ↑ Irene Netta, Ursula Keltz: 75 years of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau Munich . Ed .: Helmut Friedel. Self-published by the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-88645-157-7 , p. 232 .
  7. ↑ Thomas Demand: L'image volée - Fondazione Prada. Foundation website, accessed March 23, 2018.
  8. ↑ Take the pictures away from them again! In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , March 20, 2016, page 47.
personal data
SURNAME Demand, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German artist
DATE OF BIRTH 1964
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich