Thomas Cyrill Demand

Place: Munich

Born: 1964

Biography:

Thomas Cyrill Demand is a German sculptor and photographer, born in Munich in 1964. He is known for his large-scale photographs of paper-and-cardboard reconstructions of indoor scenes. Demand grew up in West Berlin and attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and the Düsseldorf Art Academy before receiving a master’s degree in fine arts from Goldsmiths College in London in 1994. He initially focused on sculpture, using photography to document his paper-and-cardboard reconstructions. In 1993, however, photography and sculpture traded places in his artistic process; the photograph became the ‘end product,’ with the sculpture providing a means to that end. Demand’s subsequent sculptures were created specifically to be photographed. Working in front of a camera, Demand builds three-dimensional indoor scenes from coloured paper and cardboard, using as models images drawn from personal memories and, more often, photographs found in the mass media. Humans are absent from Demand’s photographs, but evidence of human activity abounds in them. He currently lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles, and teaches at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg.