The Brooklyn Rail

Who is in control of the image? This question is at home in the work of Thomas Demand (b. 1964). The German artist pays meticulous attention to the execution of his sculptural and photographic work. But also as a viewer, while looking at the public images in news- and other feeds, he is interested in the decisions that have been made before we get to see a photo. The two worlds are not unrelated.

When Demand encounters an image that he wants to stage and reflect on, he first builds the scene as an abstracted model of paper. When this paper sculpture is finished, he photographs the result, finetuning the framing and lighting in the studio. The scenes relate to life, but with the absence of people, or explanations, there is just the abstracted scene, expressed in objects, as a kind of still life.

Demand’s current exhibition in Berlin adds a new chapter to his work. The majority of works are printed on copper, a material he has not used before, but which obviously has a history in print making. As it is a heavy material the works on copper can only be small in size; they are intimate and iconic. The way they hold and reflect light is different from the support he has used in previous works.

Demand’s abstractions build on memory. They refer to situations you might have encountered in a personal, cultural, or political context. They might also hide/contain a story that once was part of the headlines. The Rail met with the artist in his gallery in Berlin to talk about the unstable process of perception and the search for images that matter.

Jurriaan Benschop (Rail): You have mentioned that some of your works are based on how you remember seeing a certain motif rather than on immediate observation, or on a photograph where you could see and check all the details.

Thomas Demand: I mentioned that regarding an early work, Staircase (1995), which was the staircase of the school I attended. I was and am still interested in how images come to mind and how they get pieced together and evolve. What is it that makes us put the image of a table together in the mind? I read a lot of Bertrand Russell at the time, and somewhere there he asks if our notion of a table is formed by the use of it—to put something on it, eat from it—or from a formal element—legs and a top. Similarly, I was wondering what would be the five images in my mind and my memories that formed my notion of a staircase.

For Tunnel (1999) I was fascinated by the shared impressions we instantly memorized of the tunnel where Princess Diana died, rather than the tunnel as it actually looks. At the moment she died, I lived in Paris, and in the days after, you’d see only the clumsiest simulations of what happened in the tunnel. You could not go inside, as it was being investigated. After a couple of days, some witness came and said that he might have scared the driver of Diana’s car when he came through an entrance from the right to merge into the tunnel. Even if this turned out not to be the cause of the accident, suddenly the image of the tunnel as we imagined it changed, as it included an extra lane coming from the Place de la Concorde.

A similar thing happened with Control Room (2011), which is based on the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. There was a picture of that room which someone on the rescue team had made with his phone, capturing the workers trying to prevent the meltdown, going there heroically instead of fleeing the scene. That was a touching photograph. They were standing in front of the panels and then the ceiling fell down. I saw that photograph and thought it was most intense as an image. A couple of days later, the officials replaced the press photo. There was still chaos to be seen on the desks, but they had pasted the original ceiling back in it. Apparently, they did not want the full-scale chaos being visible.

Rail: And this happens a lot, doesn’t it? Also with the Iran war recently. We are prevented from seeing things that happen.

Demand: It happens a lot. We know about this kind of manipulation, but still it works. My work over the years is not so much about fake memory, but about how memory distorts. It shapes our worldview and also our individuality. Usually people have images coming up if you mention a certain incident, like Lady Di in Paris. The pictures come up immediately. Neurologists know that we re-assemble pictures all the time. We change them constantly, according to our situation and needs. It is a very unstable process. But we made images part of our lives—take the idea of luxury, for instance. What is the image that comes up if you think about it? For some it might be an expensive watch or a beach, for others a large apartment—for instance, for Parisians.

Rail: Looking at your work, for instance, Melons (2025) from the current exhibition, I can go two ways. Visually there is quite a lot to enjoy, without knowing the back story. Do you figure that the work should function by itself like that, visually? Or do you need the story, which in this case is about fake melons that were used to smuggle drugs into the US?

Demand: One thing I am concerned about is: when you look at the work, do you think I made this up, or do you think this happened somewhere? That makes a big difference, because one would be a somewhat global statement, the other one a place which we might have seen before. That is a key point. Then if you are curious, you can find out. That is the promise of the museum, the media—the way it got to you. You can read, but you don’t have to. I would never want to impose my understanding on you. But if you ask me, I answer. My titles are blunt; they do not explain the story. I can only tell you when you ask me. But I don’t think you need to know. That is why the title is non-descriptive.

Rail: But you need the story to make it.

Demand: Yes, and I think it should be interesting to talk with an artist about his work. It is figurative art, it has to do with photography, it is obviously specific—linked to something. I’m happy to give you information. But if you just look at the melons, it should work, as much as it works when Henri Matisse paints a Moroccan motif.

Rail: What is the moment your work comes into being? I could imagine it is long before the actual sculpture is being executed, and before the photo is taken. Do you know that a work is born when you see it in your imagination?

Demand: The thing is, sometimes I am not aware of really what the point will be. Take Paperstars (2025) from the current exhibition. First I thought, “I can’t use that image of the stars”—it was too handicraft. Then at some point I sat in a bakery in Austria and I looked at the ceiling, and it had this irregular pattern. Then things came together; I combined the stars with this ceiling. That is a firmament, and that is the stars. A thing can be on my mind, but I am not sure what it is. Then comes another thing, and then I think maybe I can do it. Working with your hands is really good for your brain.

Rail: For the viewer, there is the photo. But where does the work exist for you? Is it mainly making the sculpture in the studio? Is the idea the most important part?

Demand: I am trying to do everything that you see when you look at my picture. For instance, with the melons, I did five or six pieces myself, to see how it works. Then my assistant can take over, as I do not have to make them all. But I like the doing part, and it is important. The work is not just the idea. For me, making the work in the studio is also the thinking part.

When I did Cavity (2025), it took me weeks. I can think very clearly when I do the handwork. And I get ideas for other work. For some works I need assistants, for instance, for Ballroom (2025), I needed them to build the walls, but it is not that I prefer to have them execute the work in general. Ballroom came when I started researching theater and opera stage models, and I stumbled upon this eminent figure of stage design, Joseph Urban. He went to America, did stages for Boston, for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and for the Ziegfeld Follies. But he actually wanted to be recognized as an architect. Eventually one of his first commissions as such was in Palm Beach, Florida—Mar-a-Lago! Of course, this is the site of the classified files that Trump moved. In my photo, two worlds visually collide: the world of entertainment (the ballroom) and the administration and its rituals (staging the boxes with the files).

Rail: Looking at your work over the years, I thought you must really like painting.

Demand: I started as a painter, in art school, and before that, as a child. Naïvely, in the beginning I had the feeling that I could paint anything. But I didn’t know why and what, so in art school it looked like it worked, but it did not work. I moved from the academy in Munich to Düsseldorf after a year and started working with something I had never touched: sculpture. I wanted to reinvent myself in a medium that I had no history with—and actually no clue about, either.

Rail: But you are not a typical photographer, nor sculptor.

Demand: As we say in Germany, I am a Hanswurst in allen gassen. I never studied photography.

Rail: I understand that you have thrown away most of the sculptures after photographing them. Do you still do that? Is this conceptually necessary?

Demand: No, it is not for that reason.

Rail: You need the free space?

Demand: Yes, it is really like an empty table. Plus, these sculptures fall apart. Usually, it takes me two hours to take it all away.

Rail: And no regrets? There is no nostalgia?

Demand: All things must pass. But if you leave the object intact for too long, it starts becoming a sentimental burden.

Rail: I imagine this is because your work seems to invoke longing. The way you approach the object through the photo—it’s as if you create longing for the real thing.

Demand: That is the part of the reception. For making it, I just need the space.

Rail: I imagine the people who build for Hollywood would go crazy with your stuff and could reuse the sculptures.

Demand: I worked with people from Hollywood for my animations. They have a great understanding of the flimsiness of it. Everything is there for a very short time.

Rail: So it is not about the product or the object.

Demand: It is a process. You know, as Max Imdahl wrote about the work of Claes Oldenburg and the fact that he makes everything bigger, he said that it is like a ladder. Once you are up there, you don’t need it anymore. So I make the sculpture, but once I have done that, and the photograph is a documentation of that, I don’t need it anymore.

Rail: And you also make sure that it is a memory.

Demand: Indeed, and I also hope that the people who come to the show have their own memory of things. A good example is Bathroom (Beau Rivage) (1997). A German politician, Uwe Barschel, was found dead in a bathtub. A reporter from the major news magazine Stern was onsite and took a photo, sent the negative to the editors, and they printed it on the cover. This was a big scandal in Germany, to print the photo of a suicide scene. It was not even legal, as they would have had to go first to the police to report it before considering printing the photo. Then later the photo became part of the evidence. Anyway, thirty years later, this event was remembered, and newspapers came to me. They wanted permission to print my image instead of the original document. They wanted to have a picture of that incident, but not the real incident, not the scandalous photo, but a memory of it.

Rail: In your photo there is no person, there is just the bathtub and the blue tiles of the bathroom. A silent scene.

Demand: A similar principle applies to Presidency I (2008). The New York Times had asked me to do a picture of the Oval Office. It was still before Barack Obama was elected. To avoid any political bias, they did not want the Oval Office specifically as it was under George W. Bush, nor any other president, but an image of the Oval Office that is not anecdotal. The claim was that Bush had let Dick Cheney transform the vice presidency into this superpower, which was never intended by the Constitution. But how to get a “constitutional image” of the Oval Office? So they asked an artist: me. I had only four weeks to do it, but I was happy that they understood the point of my work and what I’m after. So, when you ask me if you can learn from the picture about the history of the USA, the answer is you cannot learn about the specific incident, or presidency, but you can learn about our use of images and media.

Or take the scattered papers of the Stasi office in Office (1995), which I think is an image that will last. It is about people who wanted their biography back, and stormed the offices of the secret police in the GDR. It became an international icon. In Hong Kong, recently, there were protests where the people went out with an empty sheet of paper. They are not allowed to say something, so they came with empty office sheets. That was a powerful image.

Rail: Your intuition seems directed towards finding images that tell something about our time. Even though you are not documenting events as a reporter, in a way you are, through rethinking images. And later we could say that these were defining images.

Demand: I am sitting on that bus, and I look at the landscape of images. I am part of this era, but I am not illustrating opinions. People impose the demand on art to be political, and more than ever the artist to be an activist. And I do think it is political, but only in the sense of being powerless. Art has influence, but no political power. I cannot tell you what to do in the Ukraine war; I don’t know more than anybody else, and if I did, I should probably move into politics. But in my case, maybe the fact that we communicate with pictures more than generations before is relevant. And now everyone has started to generate images. What in our world is based on which model, and who is making these? What has photography to do with that and our wish to have pictures? That is not political content. But I wouldn’t say it is not political. Politics is about the distribution of responsibility and of power.

Rail: Also, the choice to be an artist is political.

Demand: Absolutely, but I don’t think it should be a pamphlet about what to do. That is too one-dimensional. There is a bigger fish to fry.

Rail: I also feel that there is curatorial pressure for works to be conceptual.

Demand: Yes, but you have to see that we have a lot of help now. In the time of Peter Paul Rubens, you spent ten years of your life learning some craft. Art comes really quickly in our time; it needs to be intelligently filtered. The balance between how long it takes and how difficult it is to get there—nowadays, it is fast. Maybe we have to compensate for that with human intelligence. Intention is also important: “Why do you bring it to us?”

AI is interesting—an exercise to rethink what we do. Something like Jackson Pollock—is that thinkable through AI? I don’t think you come to that result. Knowing from a statistical ground what happened, as AI does—you won’t end up there. Also, most of the prompting is language-based. The core of AI is a language model. Visual art is so much more than what is language-based. That is a difference.

Rail: Peter Halley, when asked about AI, and if he felt threatened or affected by it, remarked that he thinks art comes in the end from human’s individual awareness of mortality. This makes a difference with AI. I did not expect to hear that from a painter like him, but it was an interesting thought.

Demand: Ok, but I think that is also the answer of an artist who is older, and he would not have said that when he was twenty. He rethinks what he did as well, looking at early works. I am also looking at my work, and I think, “Oh, they fade away.” There is nothing wrong with that statement. Most of the work is fading away; you can’t really catch it.

Rail: We are fading away.

Demand: That is the sad part of it.

Rail: I could also see your work in the tradition of the still life, and one way of seeing that is as a reflection on death.

Demand: Absolutely. Dutch painting has completely figured that part out. It is all a memento mori.

Rail: Your images are very quiet. Maybe that sounds like a cliché—every photo or painting is silent. But your work is really quite silent.

Demand: What I want to have in the bigger photographs, like Ballroom, is that you have the feeling that somebody just left the room. Then it is silent, and you can peek in. It is not a crowded room; it is always an empty room, but not idealized. It is a real specific moment and space. Specificity is important to give you a hint of where it comes from, if you are interested to know the story behind it. A show has to work in the first thirty seconds, but if it is just thirty seconds, it is not good—it has to lead to something else. In my case, part of it is how it is made—that you realize it is all a big fake. But also relating to something gives this entry point. With painting you see the brush—it has an object character. Photography doesn’t have that. It has an industrial surface. If I want to have that part of painting, I have to produce it. When you look at a Frans Hals, his faces become animated. That is quite moving, really.

Rail: Where is Thomas Demand in these photos? In a way it seems like you want to disappear from the image.

Demand: But at the same time, I am everywhere. I put the viewer into that room. That is also why the photos are so big, often. It is like windows; you stand in the room. It is like a childish fantasy; you see a picture and you can just walk into it.

Rail: The discourse around your work is often about how real or fake it is—how you do it. But apart from technique, I was wondering: what kind of temperament is behind this? I picture a slightly melancholic creator, who loves the world, but also sees it slipping away, which could be a drive to make—

Demand: That is what an artwork is for. I will not be saying yes or no to your reading. An artwork has the potential to give you the chance to consider that. I could be the biggest douchebag, love horseracing, have no patience at all, and still make these works.

Rail: I am attracted to the scenes you make, but they do not appear as spaces where I would want to be. There is something claustrophobic or stressful about them.

Demand: It is not wellness art, for sure. That is a genre in itself now, the pictorialization of wellness. AI does that very well, by the way. I just curated a show about architectural photography in Vienna which opened at the end of May. In this context we were looking for a certain picture by Édouard Boubat—he photographed in the 1950s and ’60s, making pictures like the boy with the fish, the kiss in the rain. I realized that he has a friendly tone in his photographs, a feeling like “life is beautiful.” For twenty years after the war, photography was mainly there to show how beautiful life is. Even poor people can have fun—the sailor in Portugal enjoying the sun, even after a hard day of work. That kind of optimism has evaporated from this media. It is much harsher nowadays, much more documentary, in the sense of “this is how it looks.” Also, the role of kids has completely changed. Now it is about misery. Apart from what this says about our time, it also shows that the expectations of photography are changing all the time.

Rail: Which is related to the fact most people have a phone with a camera. As Cecily Brown has bluntly put it: “The phone is obviously the death of society and culture.”

Demand: I used to find things I could use for my work in books. And then I was hoping nobody else saw it, until I had my own go at it. Then the internet came. Now everything is on the table. Research itself is no fun anymore, you just pick like an editor. To create this excitement of having found something, like a trove, you need to find other ways. It is only in the last thirty years that sending pictures through the internet became popular and possible. What Cecily kind of rightly pointed out is that you have everything on a little device and it takes you out of the real world; it appears to be a mousehole you can escape through. In addition, now with photography everything is backlit, which is another problem. I am not complaining about these things. An artist needs problems—something we have and want to deal with. It is a challenge.

Rail: You need to carve out a space that is not there, in the sense of images—even if that is often not fully possible.

Demand: Every artist would claim that. You hope that you don’t repeat knowns. Then again, AI comes into it—they hope to kind of repeat what is there already. But I am quite optimistic; I find AI an amazing tool. It is all up my alley. I am looking for the common denominator—something you can recognize. Even though I am obviously not happy about the appropriation.

Rail: Thinking about the USA: it seems like we are living during a big shift into a repressive society. I was wondering what your thoughts about that are. You live and work both in Los Angeles and in Berlin. Also in your work, there are several anchor points connecting you to the USA in moments or places. What was your entrance into the USA? Was it the research grant you got at the Getty?

Demand: No, I was living in New York for three years already in the nineties before I moved to Berlin. I came on a grant from the Netherlands. I stayed there, a gallery showed my work, one thing led to another. My biggest collector in fact is the National Gallery in Washington. They have more than twenty five works. You should not forget that the US is also the biggest producer of images—if you think of film, popular culture, games—of iconic imagery. Maybe apart from China, although I can’t really say.

Rail: Those first years in New York—were they relevant to the content of your work?

Demand: Absolutely, until I got homesick. After some years I thought, “I am never going to be an American, and I am losing touch with what happens in Europe.” I felt like the American at the Oktoberfest in Germany. You put on lederhosen, you have the outfit, but you never get the point. I felt the other way around. I never understood the Americans really. I did not grow up with the TV series—the popular culture had so many images that are embedded in the use of language. I can learn about it, but I will never internalize it fully. Eventually, Dan Graham put me in touch with Klaus Biesenbach, who was back then trying to collect money to renovate an old factory in Berlin to create the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art. I could rent a floor there in the Auguststrasse for three years. Later, I had a studio together with Olafur Eliasson for fifteen years. Regarding the US, we stayed again from 2010 onwards till 2022, but then in Los Angeles. I still have the house there. I don’t have a studio anymore, but in LA you easily rent a studio—you find it in a day. The film business rents temporary spaces all the time. They are used to it, unlike Berlin.

Rail: What does it give you to work in Los Angeles?

Demand: The banal answer would be: nobody calls me. I have nobody to bother me the whole day, which is very different from Berlin, or another place where people know you. Also, the light is completely stable. When I shoot in Berlin, I have to do things before the rain season comes, because my things can wobble. Other than my older work, I nowadays use natural light a lot. In LA, you just have sun, and if you don’t finish today, you’ll do it tomorrow.

Then, I did not owe anything to the people living there. I wasn’t part of the culture, and that can be liberating. That has changed though—now we do know many people and have a lot of friends. But the city is opaque, it isn’t easy to enter. In that sense LA is very different: how people get together, how they communicate, how they structure their day. For me it is interesting as a counter-program—the patience, the calm way of running things. Then there is also the size. You get things in big sizes. You have spaces without columns. Every industrial structure has wooden beams. There is a skylight, and there is no column. In Berlin that is impossible.

Rail: LA, as a film city, is good for you.

Demand: Yes, and not just for me. A lot of students, when they finish art school, they go to LA. They can afford it and have a little garden. They might have to drive, but there is work in entertainment, film, gaming, and in art. Everything became unaffordable in New York. That is what my assistants in LA told me.

Rail: You don’t find that all this is changing because of the current administration? There is a big shift—a hostile climate towards independent art.

Demand: I don’t want to tell Americans what is happening in their country. That would not be appropriate. Plus, you should not forget: it is only half of them who voted for Trump. The election was like fifty-fifty. My audience was always the other half anyways. And the part I talk to, they go on the street, to demonstrate this has changed in recent years. There is a lot of resistance. It is kind of heroic: they risk being shot to protest ICE. The courts also fight back. They are quite resilient.

Rail: As a German you know very well where it can lead to. In that sense, the German-American relationship is interesting.

Demand: Absolutely. My late friend Alexander Kluge told me many times about the local elections in Thuringia in 1927, where the Nazis first only got 3 percent, but then it grew fast—in 1932, it was 42 percent. They came through the backdoor. They were really bad at budgeting and money. It did not come full force, but in two or three years it was done. Democracy is a very vulnerable system and based on a lot of agreements that are not written laws, but more like gentlemen’s agreements. You don’t have a law against bullying—we just do not do that. And then, when it happens and becomes official language, you are baffled.

Rail: European governments are still speaking about the US as an ally. But the takeover is already there in the US. It is not that it might happen; it has happened.

Demand: For a big part it is there, but I hope it is reversible. It won’t go back to what it was, but I hope it is reversible. And you have to keep in mind that it is not isolated—Germany is also not on the sunny side. The economy is not running very well. If the current government doesn’t hold, the Alternative for Germany will come into power.

Rail: Poll (2001) seems, in retrospect, a defining picture, if you want to understand what is happening now in the US with the fragility of democracy. It refers to the recount in Florida of the Bush/Gore presidential election in 2000. There were questions about the validity.

Demand: But Al Gore conceded. That was an example of gentleman’s behavior, which back then still existed. For me, what is essential about Poll is that it was an emergency center where the recount took place. It was a place for when there is a flood or hurricane coming, to coordinate the help effort. Back then I was looking at the relationship between a model and reality, and thinking of the many caricatures of a mouse in a labyrinth. So I wrote to academic institutions which do behavioristic experiments, and I asked them for pictures of the experiments they do with animals. They said, “We don’t need pictures, we just need the statistics.” At the same time, these images of the recount were everywhere. I just realized: that is a maze, and we are the mice! An election in the US reminded me of a behavioristic experiment: go left, get food; go right, get an electric shock, and someone measures how quickly you learn. Furthermore, in the image, there is a telephone and a torch on every desk. But nobody could tell me what the torches were for. Maybe for the eventuality of a power outage, to make sure no one manipulates the ballots. For me, it is a powerful image, but the reason that I stumbled over it was not the recount in the first place, but my research into models. That is an example of the lucky artist finding something that is pure gold, over time.