Thomas Demand: Catalogue Serpentine Gallery London

by Beatriz Colomina

Thomas Catalogue Serpentine Gallery London Thomas Demand is one of the most celebrated contemporary photo artists. At first sight, Demand’s pictures, say of a kitchen, an elevator, or a car park, seem like depictions of everyday places. Yet on closer inspection they turn out to be reconstructions of Demand creates life-size environments made of paper and cardboard and accurate down to the smallest details, photographs these "re-creations" and then destroys them. The pictures that arise in this way put their finger squarely on the drab aesthetics of the modern office world and architecture. Demand’s sculptural and somehow filmic simulations, completely devoid of people, lead us into a world of models, in which a "faked" reality blends with the memory of a real reality to generate vividly cool images and to investigate the concept of virtual reality that plays such a key role in our technological multimedia age. Text by Beatriz Colomina Interview between Thomas Demand and Alexander Kluge Book design by Supermarket / Naomi Mizusaki Thomas Demand, born in Munich in 1964, studied in Munich and Düsseldorf and at Goldsmith’s College, London. He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Europe and the US.

143 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2006

About the author

Beatriz Colomina is founding director of the program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University and Professor in the School of Architecture.

She has written extensively on the interrelationships between architecture, art, media, sexuality and health.

Reviews

[Michael Vagnetti · Rating 4 out of 5]

A crafter's delight: Demand sculpts environments out of paper and cardboard - here, crime scene interiors - then photographs them and destroys the sculptures. Yes, paper: that bathtub, with tiles; the chain-link fence; the copy shop with trays and bundled reams.

Beatriz Colomina wrote the essay, "Media as Modern Architecture." She's one of these cross-disciplinary raiders of the post-modern condition. The premise is how modern architecture is all about the mass-media image, and discusses how two-dimensional publications fake buildings through model-making and then end up playing a huge role in how they're perceived/experienced, as buildings. Demand, then, flips it: he takes two-dimensional images, then turns them into three-, and then converts them back to two-. Various implication dominoes then fall.

Book as museum: The book actually comes with swatches of ivy the wallpaper used in the museum exhibition. Huge captions and fifth colors.