Thomas Demand (b. 1964)

Archiv (Archive)

Details

Thomas Demand (b. 1964)
Archiv (Archive)
chromogenic print on photographic paper and Diasec
72¼ x 91¾ in. (183.5 x 233 cm.)
Executed in 1995. This work is from an edition of five.

Provenance

Victoria Miro Gallery, London

Literature

U. Grosenick and B. Riemschneider, Art at the Turn of the Millennium, New York 1999, p. 121 (illustrated)

Exhibited

Essen, Museum Folkwang, Raum Zeit Bild Raum, August-October 1996, p. 90 (illustrated; another print exhibited)
Calais, Le Channel, Galerie de l'ancienne poste; and Centre d'art contemporain de Vassiviere en Limousin, Thomas Demand, December 1996-June 1997, p. 19 (illustrated; another print exhibited)
Berlin, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Positionen künstlerischer Photographie in Deutschland seit 1945, September 1997-January 1998, p. 143, pl. 89 (illustrated; another print exhibited)
Kunsthalle Zurich; and Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Thomas Demand, March-September 1998 (illustrated; another print exhibited)
Kunstmuseum Bonn; and North Miami, Museum of Contemporary Art, Great Illusions: Demand, Gursky, Ruscha, June-November 1999, p. 65 (illustrated; another print exhibited)
Paris, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Thomas Demand, November 2000-February 2001, pp. 66-67 (illustrated; another print exhibited)
Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Public Offerings, April-July 2001, p. 32 (illustrated)

Lot Essay

Each of Demand's life-sized sets are entirely constructed from paper. Modelled with excruciating detail from archive photographs, Demand chooses to reconstruct 'crime scenes' with forensic accuracy: each treated with the same documentary sense of suspension and qualm. Sharing the desolation of Edward Hopper and not quite right eeriness of Cindy Sherman's Stills, Demand's 'virtual realities' are perhaps the most disturbing because they do something that virtual reality never intended; they re-create the real. These are photographs of contemporary legends, the real-life media friendly horror stories of popular gossip.
(P. Ellis, Notorious, London 1998

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