Thomas Demand

Matthew Marks is pleased to present Thomas Demand. The exhibition includes fifteen new photographs.

Thomas Demand is well known for his photographs based on images circulated in the media or everyday scenes that capture his attention, which he meticulously recreates by hand in his studio from paper and cardboard before photographing. In 2011, Demand began the Model Series, in which he photographed models made by architects and designers, including John Lautner, Gio Ponti, and Hans Hollein, and the fashion designer Azzedine Alaïa. In the artist’s own words: “It’s the sculptural presence, and the traces of someone’s practice, of understanding and remodeling, which raised my attention.”

In Demand’s newest works, the artist has photographed 18th and 19th century models for opera and ballet sets in museum collections in Vienna, Monaco, and Munich. Using a periscope to navigate these delicate labyrinths of miniature scenography, Demand animates the handmade paper maquettes with stunning arrays of light and shadow, highlighting the dramatic, dreamlike landscapes of the stage sets originally made for Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Rossini’s Guillaume Tell operas, and Peter Ludwig Hertel’s ballets.

Alongside these new photographs from the artist’s Model Series, the exhibition also features several recent photographs of Demand’s own compositions, which illustrate quotidian scenes, such as an overcrowded bookshelf or reeds reflecting on the surface of a pond. These new images are printed directly onto copper, a technique inspired by copper’s art historical resonances ranging from Renaissance painting to early printmaking practices.

Thomas Demand (b. 1964) lives and works in Berlin. He has had one-person exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo and represented Germany at the 2004 São Paulo Biennial. A retrospective exhibition of 30 years of Demand’s work, “A Stutter of History,” is currently on view at the Fundación Proa in Buenos Aires. This exhibition was previously on view in museums in Shanghai, Taipei, Paris, Jerusalem, and Houston.