Sold at Auction: Thomas Cyrill Demand

(b Munich, Germany, 1964) German photographer. Thomas Demand began his studies in Germany at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München, followed by the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He received his masters in fine arts from Goldsmiths College in London in 1994. Like many post-conceptual artists of his generation, his work 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. Demand's work crucially investigates the role of photography and of the media within our image-saturated culture.* In 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.** (Credit: *Sotheby’s, London, Contemporary Art Evening, June 21, 2006, lot 65; **Christie’s, New York, The Refco Collection of Contemporary Photographs, May 5, 2006, lot 29)