Damien Maloney
Thomas Demand
Artist / Photographer

Thomas Demand studied with the sculptor Fritz Schwegler, who encouraged him to explore the expressive possibilities of architectural models at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Bernd and Hilla Becher had recently taught photographers such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Candida Höfer. Like those artists, Demand makes mural-scale photographs, but instead of finding his subject matter in landscapes, buildings, and crowds, he uses paper and cardboard to reconstruct scenes he finds in images taken from various media sources. Once he has photographed his re-created environments – always devoid of figures but often displaying evidence of recent human activity – Demand destroys his models, further complicating the relationship between reproduction and original that his photography investigates.

Demand (born 1964) has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and he represented Germany at the Bienal de São Paulo. Demand lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles.

Thomas Demand
Artist / Photographer

Thomas Demand studied with the sculptor Fritz Schwegler, who encouraged him to explore the expressive possibilities of architectural models at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Bernd and Hilla Becher had recently taught photographers such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Candida Höfer. Like those artists, Demand makes mural-scale photographs, but instead of finding his subject matter in landscapes, buildings, and crowds, he uses paper and cardboard to reconstruct scenes he finds in images taken from various media sources. Once he has photographed his re-created environments – always devoid of figures but often displaying evidence of recent human activity – Demand destroys his models, further complicating the relationship between reproduction and original that his photography investigates.

Demand (born 1964) has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and he represented Germany at the Bienal de São Paulo. Demand lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles.

  • Between Us
    Sep 1 – Oct 15, 2023
    Alexander Gray Associates
    New York, USA
    Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown presents Between Us, an exhibition gathering works by an intergenerational group of queer artists advancing the practice of portraiture. Confronting the cyclical progress and backlash of the last forty years, these artists bear witness to civil rights and gay liberation movements, the AIDS crisis, the rise of online communities, and the recurring culture wars around LGBTQIA+ rights (more…)