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Artist or Maker: Thomas Demand (b. 1964)
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Provenance: Damon Brandt, New York
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Exhibited: New York, Museum of Modern Art, Thomas Demand, March-May 2005, pp. 96-97 (illustrtated; another from the edition exhibited).
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Literature: A. Brooks, Subjective Realities, Works from the Refco Collection of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, 2003, pp. 86-87 (illustrated).
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Notes: In Thomas Demand's photographs, we are rarely looking at what we think we see. Every element in his pictures-mostly interiors, though occasionally single objects and natural imagery-is in fact made of paper. Demand began his artistic career as a sculptor, and preferred working with paper because it is inexpensive and portable. He took up photography as an ancillary means to record his constructions before they fell apart, but the tables soon turned, and by 1993 the Berlin-based artist was making paper sculptures for the express purpose of photographing them.
Although carriers of sound, the records shown in Collection are noiseless, their silence doubled by the preternatural stillness of the work. This photograph, like all of Demand's work, is absent of humans, and anonymity here is emphasized by the lack of labels on the framed records, which are arranged on the wall as if in the office of a music producer or rock star. They become abstracted geometric objects, rhythmic concentric circles that reiterate-and in some cases, reflect off of-one another. Demand usually leaves hints, traces of his deception and the work's remove from reality-visible seams or tears on his paper facsimiles, for example-and all of his images are suffused with an even, almost clinical lighting. "The viewer looks at it and it's exciting," Demand explains, "but at the same time as enjoying it, he or she realises that the whole thing might fall apart." (quoted in Matt Watkins, "In the Studio: Thomas Demand," Tate Etc., 3, Spring 2005).
