Thomas Demand Exhibition

Matthew Marks Gallery 523 W 24th St.

This event has ended.

Matthew Marks presents an exhibition of new work by Thomas Demand. The exhibition features seven new photographs and two new films in an installation specially designed by the artist.

The first room is installed with a new wallpaper created by Demand for the exhibition. On it several new Dailies photographs are hanging. Each Daily depicts an everyday scene originally captured by the artist on his cell phone. Re-created in paper and cardboard, each scene was then photographed and printed using the dye-transfer process. Elsewhere, on a pair of separate video monitors suspended from the ceiling, two short films play on continuous loop. The films were created through a similar process, starting out as paper models before being photographed and animated in stop motion.

The exhibition’s second room, accessed through a door at the back of the space, includes four new large-scale photographs. Ruine / Ruin (2017), nearly ten feet wide, is based on a news photo of a domestic interior filled with debris from an aerial bombardment. The only sign of the home’s residents is a stray sandal visible in the rubble. Werkstatt / Workshop (2017) presents the orderly interior of a violin-maker’s studio. Based on historical photos from a Bavarian village celebrated since the seventeenth century for its exceptional violins, the image includes racks of tools and dozens of instruments in various stages of completion.

Thomas Demand represented Germany at the 2004 São Paulo Biennial and has had one-person exhibitions at numerous international museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. Most recently, his work was exhibited by the Fondazione Prada in Venice last year in the acclaimed exhibition “The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied.”