Thomas Demand

b 1964 in Munich (D); 1987–89 studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich;1989–92 studied at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf (D); 1992 Cité des Arts, Paris (F);1993–94 studied at the Goldsmiths College, London, M.A.; 1995 Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (NL).
Each of Thomas Demand’s photographs is one or more steps removed from reality, creating tension between the fabricated and the real. He begins with a pre-existing photograph of an actual location culled from the mass media. While his large-scale photographs resemble these mass-media images, they actually show three-dimensional, life-sized models made from cardboard and paper that Demand builds in his studio solely for the purpose of being photographed. Demand knowingly uses the traditional role of photography as a faithful transcriber of the world to throw his subject’s artificiality into doubt. This confounding of references is such that the very idea of an original recedes completely. Lives and works in Berlin (D).