Thomas Demand

Thomas Demand Photo Corner/Photobooth 2009 C-print on Aludibond under Plexiglas (Diasec). 179.5 x 197.7 cm. Gallery label on the reverse, there with typewritten work details. Copy 5/6 (+ 2 A.P.). Literature Udo Kittelmann (ed.), Thomas Demand. Nationalgalerie, Ausst.kat. Neue Nationalgalerie, Göttingen 2009, o.p. with ill.; Hans Ulrich Obrist (ed.), Thomas Demand and the National Gallery. Conversation about the exhibition with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Cologne 2009, p. 103 with ill.; Thomas Demand, Ausst.kat. PKM Trinity Gallery, Seoul, New York 2011, o.p. with ill.; Christy Lange (ed.), Thomas Demand. The Complete Papers, London 2018, pp. 279, 297 with illus.; Douglas Fogle (ed.), Thomas Demand. The Stutter of History, ext. cat. UCCA Edge Shanghai et al, London 2022, p. 71 with ill. A perfectly lit room with a curtained camera, a simple chair in front of a white wall, a curtain behind it: Thomas Demand's photographs depict architectures borrowed from real-life imagery, referring to political and social events that the artist deems relevant. Demand reconstructs his spaces as expansive sculptures out of paper and cardboard and then photographs them using a large-format camera. He transfers the ephemeral, three-dimensional structure into two-dimensionality, visually securing it before destroying it. Demand draws his inspiration from various sources in the media landscape. In this specific case, it was an illustration in an article in the weekly magazine "Der Spiegel" (cf. Der Spiegel, 20/1999, pp. 42-44) about past events in a GDR prison that prompted him to engage in the artistic debate: "One of the motifs I found, or let's say rediscovered, was the story of the photo booth in the political prison in Gera, where the inmates - all political prisoners - were regularly photographed, nothing out of the ordinary in everyday prison life. Years after the prison had been dissolved, it was noticed that a conspicuously large number of those portrayed had contracted blood cancer. Subsequent investigation of what might have been going on revealed that the photo site consisted of an ordinary camera, a chair, a flash, and a white wall behind it. But behind the white wall was a curtain. And behind the curtain there was another photographic apparatus, an X-ray apparatus, which again was used without the optics, that is, it probably emitted radiation to the inmates unhindered. However, all this has never been proved, nobody knows for sure. There are the survivors of the prison who are also collecting evidence, but it has never been prosecuted, because, of course, the successor state has no interest in clearing up these facts either, because this would mean that those affected would have to be paid pensions for life." (Thomas Demand, in: Thomas Demand and the National Gallery. Conversation about the exhibition with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Berlin 2009, Cologne 2009, p. 45). Demand's supposed "crime scene" photography appears familiar to the viewer, but it remains intangible and mysterious to him through the elimination of details. Only knowledge of the "story behind the picture" helps the viewer decipher the meaning of each image. The artist reveals his stories (as here in an interview), but does not automatically supply them, for example in the form of a caption or an explanatory work title. Neither the concrete historical event nor the truth content of the press photographs he processes are in the foreground for Demand. For him, they are idea-giving triggers and artistic components of his works, which thus become testimonies to his own reconstructive preoccupation with known and generally available models. Demand is not a political artist in the strict sense, but an attentive contemporary. Fotoecke/Photobooth is one of the approximately 40 works that Thomas Demand selected for his major exhibition "Nationalgalerie" in Berlin. The works gathered here all show a reference to significant social and historical events in Germany after 1945. They are images that are anchored in the collective (German) pictorial memory. In addition to the socio-political dimension described above, however, formal aspects also always come into play in Demand's selection of his originals and their transformation into paper form and photography. In this case, Demand has attempted to accurately reproduce the color palette typical of interiors in the former GDR in the 1980s. One detail that particularly fascinated him when he discovered the original, and which he incorporates in a modified form in the resulting work, is the curtain with its striking floral pattern, which in Demand's own version is almost di