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PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE SWISS COLLECTION

B. 1964
SCHREIBTISCH

signed, dated 1994 and numbered 4/5 on the reverse

chromogenic colour print with diasec face

PROVENANCE

Galerie Tanit, Munich

NOTE

Thomas Demand creates images of compelling absence and mystery. Building his life-sized environments from paper and card, each intricately constructed landscape is based on a specific location through which Demand seeks to challenge our visual awareness via a reassessment of the purported reality of the photographic medium.

Taking tangible delight in constructing the cardboard realities of his seamless environments, Demand selects psychologically charged locations which refer to their absent protagonists. Intriguingly open-ended, with no simple or single meaning for this prosaic image, Schreibtisch (desk) is one of the artist's most accomplished works of the mid 1990s. Placing the viewer at a large empty desk, Demand introduces themes of emptiness and isolation that have proven so fundamental to his subsequent oeuvre. Insuring that the trickle of information between the work and the viewer is kept to a bare minimum here, the photograph attains its power from the residual uncertainties that linger within it. Even the purely-descriptive, single word title shirks conventional responsibility in helping to decipher the meaning of this work, Demand's photographs reside within the multi-generational, Conceptual current of German photography which sprung from the taxonomic gaze of Bernd and Hilla Becher in the late 1960s. Like Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth, Demand studied at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie where the Bechers had taught, and his photographs of unpeopled, expressionless places can be seen to directly relate to the banal, documentary imagery of the Bechers' photographs. Instead of sharing in their interest in the generic however, Demand's work explores specific environments loaded with suggestion and narrative. Like many post-conceptual artists of his generation, his investigation covers notions of scale, reproduction and representation, linking him to a generation of American artists including Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson, whose highly directed, photographic tableaux owe more to television and other media than to traditional photography. In an age which places so much blind faith in the images presented to us daily, Demand's work crucially investigates the role of photography and of the media within our image-saturated culture.