{"id":14559,"date":"2017-10-09T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-10-08T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.fkv.de\/dev\/senza-categoria\/2017\/thomas-demand\/"},"modified":"2020-04-17T15:57:55","modified_gmt":"2020-04-17T13:57:55","slug":"thomas-demand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fkv.de\/en\/thomas-demand\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Demand"},"content":{"rendered":"

PATIO<\/em>, 2014
\nC-Print, Diasec
\n193 x 130 cm
\nCourtesy Spru\u0308th Magers<\/p>\n

Thomas Demand (*1964) presents the work \u201cPatio\u201d in the Frankfurter Kunstverein. Today, photography is free of the assumption that it undoubtedly depicts an instance of the real world. In a turn by now distinctive of Demand\u2019s practice, photography instead presents a reconstructed reality. The starting point is no longer a direct image of reality or an excerpt thereof, but rather places and things that have already been depicted by the media. Demand draws his motifs from mass media, the press, and the Internet. He then creates scale reconstructions of them, using paper and cardboard in his studio. The motif thus becomes a backdrop, and the backdrop a motif: an almost tautological circle in thought where the image makes its own claim on reality.<\/p>\n

\u201cPatio\u201d reproduces details from the backyard of the house that served as the hideout for one of the most wanted men in America: James \u201cWhitey\u201d Bulger. Bulger lived undetected for more than sixteen years in a humble apartment in Santa Monica until he was captured there in 2011 after several warrants had been issued for his arrest. The events even made their way into the German television program \u201cAktenzeichen XY\u2026 ungel\u00f6st\u201d. The ubiquitous practice of amateur tourist videos was ultimately what led to Bulger\u2019s detection. Since 1991 he had been on the FBI\u2019s most-wanted list for his involvement in 19 murders, blackmail, unauthorized possession of firearms, bank robbery, criminal conspiracy, and money laundering. Bulger became a public figure, eventually inspiring the novel \u201cBrutal\u201d, which Martin Scorsese would base his film \u201cDeparted\u201d on. Several other film and television productions would also be based on the criminal\u2019s biography, including \u201cBrotherhood\u201d, \u201cBlack Mass\u201d, and an episode devoted to him on \u201cGangsters: America\u2019s Most Evil\u201d. The entanglement of a real subject and their mediatized public image become almost tangible here.<\/p>\n

Demand\u2019s work portrays the conspicuous inconspicuousness of this place: the invisibility of a man who managed to remain hidden in a big city and subsequently adjusted his life to become as unspectacular as possible. This image shirks all expectations of spectacle and depictions of the violence that Bulger and his arrest were linked to. In his work, Demand augments the original mediatized image, inverting the relationship between signifier and signified, word and image as well as the question of the veracity of representation. The motifs Demand chooses often conceal the aftermath of destruction, either human or natural, within them. He seeks out fragments, artificially reconstructs them and empties them of any narrative or human presence. The reconstructions, however, maintain important references to reality: both the one-to-one scale of the set and the dimensions of the photographic space. The viewer\u2019s body thus enters into a physical relationship with the work. Demand\u2018s works are deceptive, and their \u2018photorealistic\u2019 manner of representation gives the viewer a false sense of reality. His motifs are distanced from reality through several stages of transformation. The viewer\u2019s perception is cheated, and they are left to cognitively rediscover and compose what\u2019s really real. His image doesn\u2019t tell a story. It remains open, producing a space of imagination, interpretation, and poetry.<\/p>\n

Thomas Demand lives and works in Berlin (DE) and Los Angeles (US). He received international credits for his numerous group and solo exhibitions and is one of the most well-known photo artists in Germany. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (DE) and later attended the sculpture class at the Art Academy D\u00fcsseldorf (DE) and graduated at Goldsmiths College in London (UK). Since 2011, Demand is Professor for Sculpture with emphasis in Photography at University of Fine Arts of Hamburg (DE).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PATIO, 2014 C-Print, Diasec 193 x 130 cm Courtesy Spru\u0308th Magers Thomas Demand (*1964) presents the work \u201cPatio\u201d in the Frankfurter Kunstverein. Today, photography is free of the assumption that it undoubtedly depicts an instance of the real world. In a turn by now distinctive of Demand\u2019s practice, photography instead presents a reconstructed reality. The …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"mc4wp_mailchimp_campaign":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[134,148,388,375,387],"class_list":["post-14559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-senza-categoria","tag-frankfurter-kunstverein","tag-franziska-nori","tag-patio","tag-perception-is-reality","tag-thomas-demand"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fkv.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fkv.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fkv.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fkv.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fkv.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fkv.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14559\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fkv.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fkv.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fkv.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}