Header img
Kontrollraum / Control Room, 2011, C-Print / Diasec
200 x 300 cm
© Thomas Demand, Adagp, Paris, 2023

Exhibition

Thomas Demand

The Stutter of History

From 14 February to 28 May 2023

Jeu de Paume – Paris

Thomas Demand. The Stutter of History is the first major retrospective of Thomas Demand in France, it presents 60 works (photographs, films and wallpapers), covering the major aspects of Demand’s work.

What would a history painting look like for a world saturated in images? Something like the work of Thomas Demand.

Thomas Demand has spent the last two and a half decades bringing together his talents as both a sculptor and a photographer in an attempt to capture the uncanny stutter of history that lies at the root of our contemporary image culture. Demand’s images may appear to depict the real world but upon closer inspection they resonate with a fragile similitude that belies the fact that they are actually photographs of his handmade three-dimensional sculptural recreations of found images culled from the media.

After choosing his source images, Demand uses colored paper and cardboard to painstakingly reconstruct the spaces that they depict in three dimensions at a one to one scale. He then photographs these scenarios and subsequently destroys his models leaving behind only the ghostly photographic doppelgänger.

 

Exhibition tour

UCCA Edge, Shanghai (July 8 – September 4, 2022), Jeu de Paume, Paris (February 14 – May 28, 2023), Israel Museum, Jérusalem (August 9, 2023 – February 10, 2024), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (June 16 – September 15, 2024), Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei (November 30, 2024 – March 9, 2025).

Curator: Douglas Fogle.

The exhibition is co-organised by FEP (Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis / Paris / Lausanne) and UCCA (Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing / Shanghai), in collaboration with Jeu de Paume.

With the help of the Esther Schipper Gallery, Paris and the Goethe Institute of Paris.

Partners: SNCF Gares & Connexions, Les Inrockuptibles, Trax Magazine, Mouvement.