Thomas Demand2004911Kunsthauz Bregenz1993200466

Ralph RugoffJulia Franck

Thomas Demand is one of the most celebrated contemporary photo artists.

At first sight, Demand’s pictures, say of a kitchen, a copy shop, or a car park, seem like depictions of everyday places. Yet on closer inspection they turn out to be reconstructions of reality: Demand creates life-size environments made of paper and cardboard and accurate down to the smallest details, photographs these “re-creations” and then destroys them. The pictures that arise in this way put their finger squarely on the drab aesthetics of the modern office world and architecture.

Demand’s sculptural and somehow filmic simulations, completely devoid of people, lead us into a world of models, in which a “faked” reality blends with the memory of a real reality to generate vividly cool images and to investigate the concept of virtual reality that plays such a k