Thomas Demand, born in 1964, showed a comprehensive solo exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie from September 18, 2009. It was the largest presentation of his work in this country to date, while extensive exhibitions had already been dedicated to him in London, New York and Zurich, for example. However, the “National Gallery” exhibition is not a retrospective overview show, but is dedicated to one topic, perhaps the most important in Demand’s multifaceted work: Germany. The approximately 40 works, including completely new and never-before-seen works, deal with social, historical and political events in this country, primarily since 1945. The timing of this exhibition is therefore not chosen by chance, but coincides with the anniversaries of two fundamental historical events German history: the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany 60 years ago and the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.
Thomas Demand is not a photographer in the classic sense, but a documenter of our media worlds, a reproducer and an illusionist. Photography is the medium in which his work is preserved and exhibited. He often uses images from the mass media as a starting point for the reconstruction of a certain spatial situation, which then becomes a two-dimensional image using a large-format camera and great care before the artist destroys the paper sculptures. In such a conceptual sense, Thomas Demand works as sculpturally as he does photographically. Specific traces of the events depicted are systematically eliminated in the three-dimensional, life-size replica, as are the people present in the original photographs. What remains are phantom images of “crime scenes” of absent events that seem just as familiar to us as they often remain intangible.