Thomas Demand

Thomas Demand is one of the artists that Jeff suggested for me during our meeting. I remembered him because I saw his work at the National Gallery a couple of months ago, and at the MOMA over the summer. His work at the National Gallery completely blew me away. As I approached the work from far they appeared to be ordinary photos of the oval office. They were large, 10 foot high prints that dominated the gallery space. As I grew closer I realized who the artist was, and in turn saw that they were completely constructed environments made out of paper.



The piece I saw at the MOMA was equally intriguing because again I did not know it was him until close inspection.


German photographer Thomas Demand uses two forms of created reality. He completely creates the environment that we see in front of us. The image that we look at is not of an actual place, but of a space that the artist has fabricated and made specifically for us to view. Then he photographs it and destroys it so that the fabricated space does not actually exist anymore. So we the viewer go from seeing a picture and immediately assuming that it is reality, to realizing that it is made out of paper, to realizing that this space does not and will never actually exist again. It is this idea of playing with the viewers conception of reality that I am most interested in. We are so quick to assume, so quick to accept that we give very little time to actually thinking about what it is that we see in images daily.