Thomas Demand (Munich, Germany 1964)

Thomas Demand studied at the art academies in Munich and Düsseldorf. He received an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2011, Demand has been working as a professor at HFBK, the Hamburg University of Fine Arts. The artist lives and works in Berlin.

Thomas Demand is not a photographer in the classical sense, but a documenter of our media worlds, a reproducer and an illusionist. He often uses images from the mass media as a starting point for his paper reconstructions of a particular spatial situation. Specific traces of the events depicted are systematically eliminated in these three-dimensional, life-size reconstructions, as are the people present in the original photographs. These "artificial worlds" are then transformed into a two-dimensional image using a large-format camera and great care, before Demand finally destroys the paper sculptures.

So even the stuffy, wooden "bus stop" from 2009 cannot and should not be recognised as a very special waiting station with cult status. It was modelled on the school bus stop where the two members of the now internationally famous teen band Tokio Hotel, Bill and Tom Kaulitz, often waited for the bus during their school days. In August 2008, the town of Loitsche, the home community of the two musicians, put the bus stop up for sale in parts on eBay after this pilgrimage site for mainly female fans was destroyed by rioters along with its graffiti and declarations of love. The picture of the cottage made the rounds of the world press and thus became an interesting motif for Demand.

His works are represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Museum Folkwang, Essen, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Tate Modern, London, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.

Copyright the artist. Photo UniCredit Group