Thomas Cyrill Demand

1964 München
- lebt und arbeitet in Berlin und London


In 1987, Thomas Demand began his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and switched to the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf in 1989, where he was a pupil in Fritz Schwegler's master class. Between 1993 and 1994 he studied and worked at the Goldsmith College in London. To finish his studies, Thomas Demand attended the "Reijksakademie" in Amsterdam.
During his studies, he firstly photographed his plastic works for documentary reasons and this way he arrived at artistic photography. To enhance the quality of taking and to bring out the specifics of perspective rendering Thomas Demand arrived from the miniature camera to the large format camera - the photographic works then became his real artistic products. He still built real spaces or scenarios, we know as pictures from the media, in original size from paper and cardboard in his studio and used them for his motifs.
Yet, the events or elementary pictured could not be gathered from the works due to the fact that Demand avoided already in his models all identifiable details. He intentionally chose banal titles for his photographs without concrete reference - they were rather mediacritical examinations of photography as such and its quality rating. Thomas Demand was met by great approval through group and solo exhibitions and is today counted among the best known German photo artists together with Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff.

Related artists:  Beuys, Joseph  |  Christo  |  Dexel, Walter  |  Förg, Günther  |  Hamilton, Richard  |  Hausmann, Raoul  |  Hirst, Damien  |  Hockney, David  |  Horn, Rebecca  |  Kippenberger, Martin  |  Lissitzky, El  |  Lüthi, Urs  |  Magritte, René  |  Man Ray  |  Manzoni, Piero  |  Moholy-Nagy, László  |  Polke, Sigmar  |  Rainer, Arnulf  |  Rauschenberg, Robert  |  Richter, Gerhard  |  Rodchenko, Alexander Mikhailovich  |  Zille, Heinrich