Matthew Marks Gallery

Thomas Demand

Thomas Demand’s work investigates the persistence of images and their ability to embed themselves in a society’s collective memory. He studied sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Bernd and Hilla Becher had recently taught a generation of German photographers, including Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Candida Höfer. Like those artists, Demand often makes mural-scale photographs, but instead of finding his subject matter in landscapes, buildings, and crowds, he uses paper and cardboard to meticulously reconstruct images taken from various media sources, often well-known historical pictures or widely seen photographs from the news. Once he has photographed his re-created environments — always devoid of figures but often displaying evidence of recent human activity — he destroys his models, further complicating the relationship between reproduction and original.

Demand expanded the scope of his practice in 2008 with the series Dailies, photographs of constructions based on his own smartphone snapshots. In another recent series, Model Studies, he photographed scale models by architects such as John Lautner, SANAA, and Hans Hollein. Since 2002 Demand has also made films using stop-motion animation and a slow, painstaking manipulation of his paper and cardboard models.

Thomas Demand (b. 1964) lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles. He has had one-person exhibitions at museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, Museum Leuven in Belgium, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, and Fundacíon Botín in Santander, Spain. In 2004 he represented Germany at the São Paulo Bienal.

Selected Works

Exhibitions

THOMAS DEMAND
Model Studies

February 17–April 9, 2022

7818 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles

THOMAS DEMAND

February 17–April 7, 2018

523 West 24th Street
New York

THOMAS DEMAND

January 24–April 4, 2015

1062 North Orange Grove
7818 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles

THOMAS DEMAND
Dailies

November 2, 2013–January 18, 2014

526 West 22nd Street
New York

THOMAS DEMAND

May 5–June 23, 2012

522 West 22nd Street
New York

Group Exhibitions

HOME LIFE

January 29–March 27, 2021

523 West 24th Street
New York

THOMAS DEMAND, KATHARINA FRITSCH, ROBERT GOBER, BRICE MARDEN, KEN PRICE, MARTIN PURYEAR, CHARLES RAY, PAUL SIETSEMA, ANNE TRUITT, TERRY WINTERS

September 14–October 21, 2017

1062 North Orange Grove
7818 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles

VIJA CELMINS, THOMAS DEMAND, ELLSWORTH KELLY, KEN PRICE, PAUL SIETSEMA, REBECCA WARREN, TERRY WINTERS

February 6–April 16, 2016

522 West 22nd Street
New York

NAYLAND BLAKE, THOMAS DEMAND, TRISHA DONNELLY, VINCENT FECTEAU, WADE GUYTON

July 20–September 21, 2013

1062 North Orange Grove
7818 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles

LA CARTE D’APRÉS NATURE
An exhibition curated by Thomas Demand

July 19–October 8, 2011

522 West 22nd Street
New York

Books

THOMAS DEMAND
The Complete Papers

Posters

THOMAS DEMAND

THOMAS DEMAND

out of print

THOMAS DEMAND

out of print