Thomas Demand Distinctively Visual

Thomas Demand is a sculptor and photographer from Germany. He is known all around the world for his phenomenal and engaging political still life artworks. When he first started he focused on sculpture, using photography to document his paper-and-cardboard reconstructions. However, in 1993, photography and sculpture traded position in his artistic process; the photograph became the “end product,” with the sculpture providing a means to that end. Demand’s following sculptures were made especially to be photographed. Photographs can look real or unusually artificial and Demand finds a perplexing balance between the two. He's considered to be one of the world’s greatest modern artists whose photographic work and, last stop-animation films, is at
When he began creating photographs of others pictures, predominantly from various media sources, Demand tried to reprivatise an image of the world and the meaning of the world with very straightforward means. First Demand begins with an image, often discovered in mass media sources and frequently dealing with traumatic or politically important events or strained from personal memories. He then builds or creates a life-size and three-dimensional in door scene which is a replica of the image. He normally does this using cardboard and coloured paper but has used other materials as well. Demand uses paper and cardboard because it is inexpensive and easily accessible, and people know how it’s made and used and that’s is disposable, which he finds important. This is because he tries to communicate through scenes that everybody is familiar with. So, when you see a picture, in a weird way you have a feeling of déjà vu. To describe and explain his work Demand likes to use the words patience, imagination, abstraction, frustration, bricolage and failure. He came to photography through sculpture and a close observation reveals the subtleties at the heart of his work. This often takes time and precision as he has to recreate an image to perfection so that it would be very hard to tell the difference. Its all about the little details. The effect of these uncanny reconstructions is to destabilise our understanding of the sites which we ‘know’ so well through reproduction. Humans are not included in Demand’s photographs, but he leaves few clues that are an indication that there has been human activity within them. To keep the theme of illusion alive in his photographs, Demand destroys his paper and cardboard models after he is finished with them, to further complicate the relationship between reproduction and original that his photography investigates, also mimicking the fleeting fascination the public has with these significant