Thomas Demand
The Stutter of History
Taipei Fine Arts Museum
January 18 — May 11, 2025
The Stutter of History - Exhibition Poster
「托瑪斯．德曼：歷史的結舌」展覽主視覺。
Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum
“I guess the core of it is making the world into a model by redoing it and stripping off the anecdotal part, that’s when it becomes an allegory, and the project becomes a metaphor. Making models is a cultural technique—without it we would be blind.”—Thomas Demand
The retrospective of celebrated German artist Thomas Demand is on view at Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). The exhibition is co-organized by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, and TFAM, curated by Douglas Fogle. It brings together nearly 70 of the artist's works from the 1990s to the present, showcasing his 30-year practice at the intersection of sculpture and photography.
Born in Munich in 1964, Thomas Demand studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich and the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts from 1987 to 1992, and earned a master's degree in fine arts from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 1994. Initially, Thomas Demand simply created sculptures with paper and cardboard, while photography originally served as a means to document his works. During the shooting process, he discovered the differences between the physical objects and their flat images captured by the camera lens, leading him to develop a method of constructing objects for the purpose of being photographed. This has subsequently become the primary medium for presenting his creations. Demand reconstructs life-size scenes of seemingly banal images from the mass media using paper and cardboard, and then photograph the scenes to create images similar to the originals. Finally, he destroys the models, leaving behind only large-format photographic prints. In this way, he questions the notion of photography as an absolutely objective or truthful medium and explores the distance between reality and representation. Demand's works have been exhibited in major museums and galleries worldwide. He represented Germany at the 26th São Paulo Biennial (2004), and appeared four times at the Venice Architecture Biennale. In light of his love for models and architecture, it is not surprising that Demand has collaborated over the years with various well-known international architects such as David Chipperfield, Rem Koolhaas, and SANAA, on projects ranging from exhibitions and installations to actual architectural building projects.
The topics of Demand's works often come from news photos of notable historical or social incidents, recreating key moments that have influenced Western or even global situations. His early works address moments of German history that he never personally experienced but learned about through images, such as the bomb-damaged room where Hitler narrowly escaped assassination in 1944 (Raum / Room, 1994), and the film archives of the Nazi-supported filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (Archiv / Archive, 1995). Additionally, Thomas Demand has reconstructed scenes of major world news events, such as the stack of documents at Donald Trump's press conference before his inauguration as U.S. President in 2017 to prove that he had relinquished control of his businesses (Folders, 2017), the hotel room where the fugitive American National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden originally stayed in Russia (Refuge Series, 2021), the storeroom of the Wildenstein Institute, where 30 paintings and sculptures that had been missing for decades were recovered during a police raid (Vault, 2012), and the abandoned control room of the Fukushima nuclear power plant in the aftermath of Japan’s 2011 Tōhoku earthquake (Kontrollraum / Control Room, 2011).
Throughout his career, Thomas Demand has been interested in our culture’s production and interpretation of “nature,” as well as the division between the artificial and natural worlds. Using over 270,000 paper leaves, he created Clearing (2003), an idyllic forest scene with sunlight streaming through the canopy, reflecting people's unfounded romantic vision of a pure and pristine nature. His work Grotte / Grotto (2006) was made with 36 tons of cardboard. The artist gathered and studied hundreds of postcards of caves sold in gift shops worldwide and built a life-sized grotto with stalactites accumulated over thousands of years. The final photographic version of Grotto becomes an ideal condensation of our collective impression of a cave. This is the only model among Demand's works that has been preserved and is currently on view at the Prada Foundation in Milan. The wall-covering photographic wallpaper work Hanami (2014), which has been installed across the entrance walls of the TFAM’s exhibition galleries, provides viewers with an immersive experience. By recreating countless cherry blossoms out of paper, Demand invites us to contemplate on the fleeting and cyclical nature of life through their ephemeral bloom.
In 2008, Thomas Demand moved from the monumental to personal and quotidian subjects, creating his Dailies series. The artist still employed the same creative methods, transforming images into paper sculptures and then photographing them. However, this series of images came from mobile phone snapshots of banal scenes he encountered daily, such as an empty yogurt cup with a pink plastic spoon left on a shelf, a bar of soap placed on the edge of a sink, a pile of letters spilling out from under a door, and cups inserted into the holes of a chain link fence. The Dailies series is Demand's attempt at creating an autobiographical narrative using ordinary visual elements, and celebrates the subtle and infinite charm of life's minutiae. These works condense his understanding of history: history is not only composed of grand events worldwide but also includes the mundane matters of our individual lives. In light of the popularization of phone-based photographic technology and our culture’s now obsessive sharing of images on social media, the artist's painstaking reproduction of these poetic if unremarkable moments from his own life in his Dailies also asks us to reflect on the outsized importance that these rapidly produced and disseminated images have taken on in contemporary society.
Thomas Demand has also used stop-motion animation in his work to explore the world of moving images. In Pacific Sun (2012), the artist recreated a piece of surveillance camera footage that went viral on the internet depicting a few moments inside a cruise ship cabin as it was hit by rogue waves from a tropical storm off the coast of New Zealand. In this film we see tables, chairs, lockers, paper plates, computer monitors, and other objects slide back and forth whimsically and erratically. Thomas Demand spent months meticulously recreating these chaotic moments frame by frame with paper and cardboard. In Balloons (2018), a string of balloons tied to a red plastic clothespin drifts slowly across a concrete and brick sidewalk, moved lazily by the wind. Only the clothespin and colorful ribbons are visible on the screen, while the balloons themselves float outside the frame, their looming presence marked only by the shadows cast on the ground, moving gracefully as if dancing to an improvised minuet. Accompanied by swaying tree shadows and occasionally by fallen leaves on the ground, the work captures poetic moments of urban life that are often overlooked and incidental.
In 2011, during his residency at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, Thomas Demand began his Model Studies series. Departing from his technique of sculpturally reconstructing existing images of the world, he turned his lens directly on the preparatory paper models of architects and designers, capturing abstract and fragmented elements within them. Whether it was the provisional maquettes of John Lautner, one of the most influential modernist architects in 20th-century America, those created by contemporary architectural firms like SANAA, or the radical paper dress patterns of the fashion designer Azzedine Alaïa, who was famous for his sculptural designs, these images reveal that the world around us is constructed on a foundation of paper. During his exploration of building environments in the visual world, Demand began using his photographic prints as wallpaper to intervene in white cube spaces, adding a spatial depth to the exhibition of his photographic works, as seen in Cones (2018) and Lockers (2018), which fill the walls of two rooms of the exhibition.
Through the ingenious use of paper as a material and the arrangement of light and shadow, Demand's works initially appear similar to documentary images of the real world, but upon closer inspection, reveal themselves to be recreations using paper and cardboard. Based on flat documentary images, Thomas Demand carefully re-construct these scenes out of paper before photographing the models and finally destroying them. Through layers of reproduction and translation between his source images and their final quasi-photographic counterparts, Demand’s ghostly works suggest that even though history lurks in our collective and individual memories in the form of images, there is always a gap in our perception of the so-called truth. Demand's work explores how the fragile texture of paper can become the carrier of images and memories, whether from our daily lives or the larger arc of world historical events. This aspect of Demand’s work highlights the tension between photographic images and the real world while questioning both the inertia of image culture and the paradox of perception.
THOMAS DEMAND (b. 1964, Munich, lives and works in Berlin) attended both the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and the Düsseldorf Art Academy from 1987 to 1992 before receiving a master’s degree in fine arts from Goldsmiths’ College in London in 1994. Thomas Demand has shown his work at major museums and galleries worldwide. His solo projects include exhibitions at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2024); Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume (2023); UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (2022); Centro Botin, Santander (2021); Garage, Moscow (2021); M Museum, Leuven (2020); Fondazione Prada, Venice (2017, 2007); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2016); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014, 2015); DHC Art Center, Montréal (2013); National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2012); the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2012); Kaldor Public Arts Project #25, Sydney (2012); Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2010); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2009); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2009); the Serpentine Gallery, London (2006); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005); the Kunsthaus Bregenz (2004); and a survey at Fondation Cartier, Paris (2001). He also represented Germany at the 26th Sao Paulo Biennale (2004). His widely acclaimed exhibition “The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied.,” a collaboration with the filmmaker Alexander Kluge and the stage and costume designer Anna Viebrock, was on view at Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2017. His work has been included in four iterations of the Venice Architecture Biennale and was recently featured at the 2nd Chicago Architecture Biennale. His work is represented in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Tate Modern, London. Thomas Demand has also curated several shows, including “L’Image Volée” at Fondazione Prada (Milan, 2016); “Model Studies” (Graham Foundation, Chicago, 2013); “La carte d’après nature” (Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Monaco, (2010); and a contribution to the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale, “Common Ground” (2012)
TAPEI FINE ARTS MUSEUM — TFAM
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