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Lot Essay
Looking at the warm interior of Thomas Demand's 1998 photograph Terrasse, it is easy to imagine that the picture was taken of a room just after a party had ended. There is food on the table, discarded napkins, seats pushed back; the coloured glow of the lamps with their paper shades makes the picture all the more festive. However, within a short time an eeriness arises: there is something not quite right about this image. The edges are too crisp, the surfaces too matt, and there is a lack of texture somehow. It is only on closer inspection that we realise that this is an ersatz scene, largely composed of paper and card. Even the napkins appear to be made from twisted sheets of blank paper.
To make his images, Demand creates entire scenes from various materials, and subsequently destroys them. His pictures show a range of subjects, sometimes anchored in a specific moment in history and sometimes conjured from his imagination. So, a room could be the one in which Hitler was almost killed in a plot by his own officers, a tunnel may be the one where Princess Diana died, a barn may be Jackson Pollock's studio. Even when the places are not fixed in a moment of history, they conjure the sense that they form part of a narrative. Indeed, it is a telling tribute to the atmosphere of Terrasse that its after-the-party ambience inspired the theme of the Belgian Pavilion in the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale; examples of Terrasse have likewise featured in almost every exhibition devoted to Demand's work, and it was shown on the cover of the 2001 edition of Parkett which was dedicated to the artist, alongside Tacita Dean and John Wesley.
Demand's pictures are uncanny in their deliberate off-key appearance, their atmosphere and the way in which the artist has managed to deconstruct the entire notion of photography and mimesis. In its function as a photograph, a medium usually considered trustworthy and used in history and journalism to document the events of the world, Terrasse is deeply problematic. It records the scene before it, yet that scene itself, created by Demand in his role as set designer and sculptor, is a fiction. In Terrasse, there are removals between the viewer and the scene that allow Demand to smuggle in an intriguingly subversive subjectivity.
'Photographs can seem convincingly real or strangely artificial. The work of German photographer Thomas Demand achieves a disquieting balance between the two... [He] begins with a pre-existing image, usually culled from the media, which he translates into a lifesize model made out of colored [sic.] paper and cardboard. His handcrafted facsimiles of architectural spaces and natural environments are built in the image of other images. Thus his photographs are triply removed from the scenes or objects they purport to depict... Combining craftsmanship and conceptualism in equal parts, Demand pushes the medium of photography toward uncharted frontiers. His originality has won him recognition as one of the most innovative artists of his generation.' (R. Marcoci, in Thomas Demand, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York 2005, back cover).
To make his images, Demand creates entire scenes from various materials, and subsequently destroys them. His pictures show a range of subjects, sometimes anchored in a specific moment in history and sometimes conjured from his imagination. So, a room could be the one in which Hitler was almost killed in a plot by his own officers, a tunnel may be the one where Princess Diana died, a barn may be Jackson Pollock's studio. Even when the places are not fixed in a moment of history, they conjure the sense that they form part of a narrative. Indeed, it is a telling tribute to the atmosphere of Terrasse that its after-the-party ambience inspired the theme of the Belgian Pavilion in the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale; examples of Terrasse have likewise featured in almost every exhibition devoted to Demand's work, and it was shown on the cover of the 2001 edition of Parkett which was dedicated to the artist, alongside Tacita Dean and John Wesley.
Demand's pictures are uncanny in their deliberate off-key appearance, their atmosphere and the way in which the artist has managed to deconstruct the entire notion of photography and mimesis. In its function as a photograph, a medium usually considered trustworthy and used in history and journalism to document the events of the world, Terrasse is deeply problematic. It records the scene before it, yet that scene itself, created by Demand in his role as set designer and sculptor, is a fiction. In Terrasse, there are removals between the viewer and the scene that allow Demand to smuggle in an intriguingly subversive subjectivity.
'Photographs can seem convincingly real or strangely artificial. The work of German photographer Thomas Demand achieves a disquieting balance between the two... [He] begins with a pre-existing image, usually culled from the media, which he translates into a lifesize model made out of colored [sic.] paper and cardboard. His handcrafted facsimiles of architectural spaces and natural environments are built in the image of other images. Thus his photographs are triply removed from the scenes or objects they purport to depict... Combining craftsmanship and conceptualism in equal parts, Demand pushes the medium of photography toward uncharted frontiers. His originality has won him recognition as one of the most innovative artists of his generation.' (R. Marcoci, in Thomas Demand, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York 2005, back cover).