Sculptor-photographer Thomas Demand on reframing reality

It seems apt that Thomas Demand would be giving me a detailed description – and I’d be fabricating a vivid picture in my head – of an upcoming exhibition neither of us has yet seen, of which no images are forthcoming, that’s being installed in Sydney while I’m in Melbourne and he’s in Berlin. Such layers of mediation and distancing are, after all, central to the work of this sculptor turned photographer turned megastar artist-at-large.

The exhibition is titled The Object Lesson and is Demand’s new staging of selected works from the Kaldor collection, for the 38th Kaldor Public Art Project, opening at the Art Gallery of New South Wales Naala Badu building this weekend. According to my imagination it’s a doozy: an installation that’s kaleidoscopic, loud, richly conceptual but viscerally engaging, hanging and hovering and plastered in wallpaper; a kind of portrait-in-objects of collector John Kaldor himself. But that’s pure speculation: you’ll just have to see for yourself.

I first came to admire Demand’s work around the turn of the millennium, having fallen in with a bunch of Brisbane-based art historians and architectural theorists with a shared interest in photography. The darlings of the moment were all German: Gerhard Richter and his paintings like blurry photographs; Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky and their monumental, saturated images of sites and places; Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose deadpan photographs of industrial architecture won them the Venice Golden Lion – in sculpture. But it was the slightly younger Demand whose work was most elusively fascinating, unsettling distinctions between photography, sculpture and architecture, between two dimensions and three.

Even then, Demand was a key figure in debates about the fate and future of photography. Some of these are dull – a binary view of photography’s “truths” and “lies” is too blunt for the subtle recursions of Demand’s work. As he says, “I am neither a detective nor a policeman nor a journalist.” It’s much more interesting to explore the work’s interplay between veracity and verisimilitude, its manifestation of one of art’s central tenets: that some truths are best told through fiction, and semblance is sometimes the purest form of fidelity.

Leading up to our Zoom call I was overawed, nervy, anticipating imminent exposure as a nitwit. So I was mightily relieved to find Demand generous and wryly funny, in an earnest Germanic mode. At 61 he remains boyish in a stubbled kind of way, and it turns out his name is not prescriptive: he’s not demanding at all but rather endearingly modest. He puts us both at ease by observing – from the shelf behind me – the “comfortable feeling” that we have many of the same books.

He’s keen to tell me about The Object Lesson, the forthcoming show, in which he sees his role as less curator, exhibition designer or even installation artist, and more conductor: “I would say it’s a circus. I’m the circus director and I have a couple of clowns.” None of his own singular works are on display because “it’s all of me everywhere”. Their “distant relatives” are present though – because “I see art by other people”, he says, “and sometimes I’m envious I didn’t do it”.

Demand is due to fly to Sydney to finish the installation a few hours after our conversation. This will be his second major work with Kaldor, his long-time collector and friend, after The Dailies had its world premiere in Sydney at the 25th Kaldor Public Art Project in 2012.

“I think we’re going to come back to the idea that a prompt cannot produce a picture, and the whole point of art, an artistic picture, is that you cannot describe it with words.”

That show, staged in the Commercial Travellers’ Association Business Club – Harry Seidler’s funny little mushroom of a building on Martin Place, from 1975 – has a story of its own. Demand tells me how he stumbled upon the building, snuck in when the attendant went to the loo and “walked up the staircase and there I see this other world of, like, stillness and stuckness – of people sitting there looking into the city centre from their windows … this bubble of commercial travellers or judges or I still don’t really know who stayed there … it’s not a hotel, it’s not a home. It’s kind of this weird, dangling thing in the middle of the city.” Demand’s exhibition took temporary possession of the whole fourth floor, made selective renovations to the perimeter bedrooms, installed one photograph in each, and The Dailies was launched.

Originally a sculptor, Demand first used photography as a means to document his elaborate paper constructions before they fell apart, and to avoid having to cart them around. Gradually the emphasis shifted from the sculptures themselves to the photographs, with the camera taking an increasingly significant role as the fixed eye for which the paper models were constructed – at full scale, always with the scene destroyed after the production of a single, carefully lit and framed image. The source material for the models is often pre-existing “found” photographs from news media, depicting a place where something of political or social significance has occurred.

Still with me? He starts with real photographs of real places, painstakingly remakes them as full-scale paper models that are close but not exact reconstructions of the image, rephotographs the scene, then destroys the model. In this way Demand re-presents the remains of the conference room where plotters tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler; the kitchen of the hut where Saddam Hussein was captured; the control room of Fukushima nuclear plant – and on it goes. Many scenes appear as seemingly banal domestic rooms, off to the side of historic events – just before or after the momentous moment.

Some subjects edge towards voyeurism – the tunnel where Princess Diana died, the hotel room where Whitney Houston ate her final, room-service meal. It feels like there’s a risk of feeding prurience, profiting from the slavering image-appetite of the paparazzi. But Demand’s elaborate translational process seems to offer a counterweight: the source images may be surreptitious and snatched, but in remaking them with such extraordinary, elaborate care, they feel somehow re-dignified. I’m thinking in particular of Junior Suite, the Houston work, the quiet intimacy of which feels less sensational than elegiac.

Many of the works’ titles are puns and Demand never gives any exposition about the significance of a given scene, leaving the viewer to their own enjoyable sleuthing of the backstory. There are never any human figures but always the haunting sense they’ve just stepped out of frame. Described as being “around the corner from the horror”, the scenes show no direct evidence of violence but frequently reckon with its shadows. There is also never any text or type: Office, for example, which reconstructs the ransacked and paper-strewn East German Stasi secret police headquarters, is full of blank pages, documents rendered void.

Amid all this portentousness there are still moments of slapstick. Landing immortalises a conservator’s photo of the aftermath following a museum visitor’s tripping down the stairs of the Fitzwilliam Museum, knocking over three Qing Dynasty vases and smashing them to bits. Remaking all those shards seems equally fateful and perverse.

The point of the models is not to deceive – to the close observer it’s clear from minor imperfections in form and surface and an uncanny flatness of colour and texture that the photographs don’t depict actual factual scenes but, rather, their reconstruction in paper. Sometimes they’re coming slightly apart, wavering at the edges, and when I confess to Demand that I find these seams oddly affecting, he laughs and says, “That. That affection I need, you see. That’s what I live from.” It’s what pays his bills.

This talk of glitches leads us to the hallucinations of AI. To my surprise he’s sanguine about its implications for creative practice. “Maybe I’ll eat my words, but at the moment I’m thinking AI is actually quite interesting because it’s a whole new Milky Way of possibilities,” he says. “At the moment we’re so happy that something – some image – is coming out, but they all look the same: it’s either advertisement photography … or it’s surrealist painting, like ‘make me a puppet with six ears that looks like Queen Mary’.” As a stated optimist, he argues “it’s art that has something to offer against the full takeover of AI … As an artist you always want to claim that you do something which is not there yet, and so being original is going to be the task much more than before.”

There’s a deeper parallel with AI in Demand’s work, given that his source images also emerge from a shared global image culture or “public iconography”, residing both in mass media and in people’s heads – as tropes, visual associations, memories and connotations. An AI search engine might be more systematic and organised than the coincidence of finding an image in a newspaper on a train, but “for me, it’s basically the same”.

Demand has also been “chewing on” the fact that the text-prompt basis of AI-image-generation seems entirely ignorant of a central argument of ’70s conceptual art – an object, a picture of that object and a description of said object are not the same thing. We all know this – it’s why we don’t eat the menu at dinner. But does AI know? Demand finds this troubling.

“Why do we place so much trust in language being able to tell a pictorial product how it should look?” he asks. “I can only explain it to myself as a complete ignorance of art history by the makers of AI. They don’t know anything about it. That would make sense, because of course they’re not artists and they might even hate art, that’s why they take it for free … I think we’re going to come back to the idea that a prompt cannot produce a picture, and the whole point of art, an artistic picture, is that you cannot describe it with words.”

One response is to focus on materiality, the actual stuff of art and life, and this is a theme in The Object Lesson. “As an artist you look at artworks as objects as much as representations of an idea, you know, because you make objects,” he says. “We always look at the surface of it, what it represents, what’s on it, what’s the context of it, but they are also really nice objects.”

This is true. Still, it’s somewhat ironic coming from Demand, given the ambiguous status of three-dimensional things in his work, the oscillation between flatness and depth, original and simulation, as a nested series of images of models of images of places. If it all sounds a bit René Magritte, you’re right: Demand tells me the title The Object Lesson is taken from Magritte’s work.

The show is being mounted in the new AGNSW building designed by Japanese architects SANAA. Demand is very familiar with their work, having spent extensive time in their office compiling his series Model Studies. He also knows this specific building: “I went for three or four years, every three or four months, to Japan from LA. And I saw that building very often on the tables, there being discussed … so I know the building as a model, you know, I knew it exactly.” I ask whether his first visit felt like walking into a full-scale replica. “Absolutely,” he says. “I had a total feeling that I’m walking through a model of theirs but just a little more refined, solid.”

Over the decades, Demand’s works have grown larger, more ambitious and much more labour-intensive. Some take years to make – Clearing, for example, depicts a forest with light filtering through a canopy made up of nearly 300,000 individually cut paper leaves. The time and craft is awe-inspiring. It’s even more pronounced in the video works, including my favourite of all, the stop-motion animation Pacific Sun – I implore you to find it on YouTube.

Demand’s work is exhilarating. It incites you to look closely and then more closely still. In a 2006 conversation with the film director Alexander Kluge he described how, on finishing a model, he stands within it, very carefully so as not to break it, and in this moment of culmination has a sense of being inside an image. This feels like the articulation of a longing I didn’t even know I had: the possibility of entering into a picture, climbing right inside and exploring it from within. Yes, I realise, on some deep existential level, yes. That’s what I want too.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
August 30, 2025 as “Scene stealer”.

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