German sculptor-photographer Thomas Demand is presenting his latest exhibition, "The Object Lesson," at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where he reframes reality through his meticulously crafted works that blur the boundaries between photography, sculpture, and architecture. The 61-year-old artist has become a megastar in the international art world by creating elaborate paper reconstructions of historically significant spaces before photographing and destroying them.
The exhibition, part of the 38th Kaldor Public Art Project opening at the Art Gallery of New South Wales Naala Badu building, represents Demand's new staging of selected works from the Kaldor collection. According to those familiar with the installation, it features a kaleidoscopic, conceptually rich but viscerally engaging display that includes hanging elements, hovering pieces, and wallpaper installations that create a portrait-in-objects of collector John Kaldor himself.
Demand's unique artistic process begins with found photographs from news media depicting places where politically or socially significant events have occurred. He then painstakingly reconstructs these scenes as full-scale paper models that closely but not exactly replicate the original images. After carefully lighting and photographing these reconstructions, he destroys the paper models, leaving only the final photograph as evidence of the elaborate process.
Throughout his career, Demand has recreated some of history's most charged spaces, including the conference room where plotters attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler, the kitchen of the hut where Saddam Hussein was captured, and the control room of the Fukushima nuclear plant. Many of these scenes appear as seemingly mundane domestic rooms positioned just before or after momentous events, creating what critics describe as being "around the corner from the horror."
Some of Demand's more controversial works edge toward voyeurism, such as his recreation of the tunnel where Princess Diana died and the hotel room where Whitney Houston ate her final room service meal. However, his elaborate translational process seems to offer a counterweight to potential exploitation. Works like "Junior Suite," depicting Houston's final space, feel elegiac rather than sensational due to the extraordinary care taken in their reconstruction.
The artist's photographs never include human figures, yet they maintain a haunting sense that people have just stepped out of frame. Text and type are also notably absent from his works. For example, "Office," which reconstructs the ransacked East German Stasi secret police headquarters, features only blank pages and documents rendered void, emphasizing the silence and emptiness left by historical trauma.
Not all of Demand's work deals with weighty historical subjects. "Landing" immortalizes a conservator's photograph of the aftermath when a museum visitor tripped down the stairs of the Fitzwilliam Museum, knocking over and smashing three Qing Dynasty vases. The artist's decision to meticulously recreate all the shards seems both fateful and perverse, demonstrating his commitment to his process regardless of the subject matter.
To close observers, it becomes clear that Demand's photographs don't depict actual factual scenes but rather their reconstruction in paper. Minor imperfections in form and surface, along with an uncanny flatness of color and texture, reveal the artificial nature of the scenes. Sometimes the models appear to be coming slightly apart or wavering at the edges, creating what Demand calls the "affection" that viewers need and that sustains his artistic practice.
Regarding artificial intelligence and its impact on creative practice, Demand remains surprisingly optimistic. He views AI as "a whole new Milky Way of possibilities," though he notes that current AI-generated images tend to look similar, resembling either advertisement photography or surrealist paintings. He argues that art has something unique to offer against the complete takeover of AI, as artists have always claimed to do something that doesn't yet exist.
Demand finds troubling the text-prompt basis of AI image generation, which he believes ignores a central argument of 1970s conceptual art: that an object, a picture of that object, and a description of that object are fundamentally different things. He questions why society places so much trust in language's ability to dictate how pictorial products should appear, attributing this to a "complete ignorance of art history" by AI developers.
This latest exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is Demand's second major collaboration with Kaldor, following "The Dailies," which premiered in Sydney at the 25th Kaldor Public Art Project in 2012. That earlier show was staged in the Commercial Travellers Association Business Club, Harry Seidler's distinctive mushroom-shaped building on Martin Place from 1975, where Demand took possession of the entire fourth floor and installed one photograph in each perimeter bedroom.
Over the decades, Demand's works have grown increasingly larger, more ambitious, and more labor-intensive. Some pieces take years to complete, such as "Clearing," which depicts a forest with light filtering through a canopy made up of nearly 300,000 individually cut paper leaves. His video works, including the stop-motion animation "Pacific Sun," demonstrate the same meticulous attention to craft and detail.
The current exhibition is being mounted in the new Art Gallery of New South Wales building designed by Japanese architects SANAA. Demand is intimately familiar with both the architects and this specific building, having spent extensive time in their office compiling his series "Model Studies" and visiting Japan regularly over three to four years to observe the building's development. When he first visited the completed structure, he experienced the surreal sensation of walking through a full-scale replica of a model he had known intimately.
For Demand, the culmination of each project comes when he stands within the completed paper model, carefully positioned so as not to break it, experiencing what he describes as being "inside an image." This moment represents the articulation of a deep human longing: the possibility of entering into a picture and exploring it from within, a desire that resonates with viewers who encounter his work and find themselves looking closely, then even more closely still.
