303 Gallery is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition of large-scale photographic works by German artist Thomas Demand.
Thomas Demand’s work examines the transitive nature of photography. Using cardboard as his only medium, the artist creates models in full scale for the sole purpose of being photographed. Demand recreates tableaux in life size in order to experience scale, gravity, and weight, which are not factors in miniature reproductions. The artist’s photographs of these tableaux are concerned with the construction of a perfect, seamless moment whose apparent truthfulness has more to do with picture-making than with any connection to the real world. Demand also explores the function of the mass media in delivering various forms of knowledge through photographs, especially those concerned with iconic figures or events.
Demand’s is a constructive, rather than documentary, practice. In the work entitled Barn, Demand painstakingly, yet with tell-tale signs of constructedness, recreates the studio in which Hans Namuth had photographed Jackson Pollock as the angry young artist of the 50’s. The resulting Demand photograph is both a tribute to, and a critique of, the connection between picture-making and the myth-making power of photography, as evidenced by the reputation of the painters of the New York School, cemented by the photographs that were taken by Namuth and others.
Studio self-consciously relates to the attenuated connection between the fabricated and actual sites that Demand photographs. Based on a famous German television game show of the 50’s, the reconstruction (from a photograph of a set), in full dazzling color becomes at once familiar and mysteriously unreal at the same frozen moment.
In other works, such as Hedge, Lawn, and Pegboard, Demand focuses on information that enters our consciousness through photography. Appearing like perfect details of the world, they focus on the perfection of the image, completely separate from their counterpart in reality.