Thomas Demand was born in 1964 in Munich. In 1987 he began his art studies at Munich’s Kunstakademie, and in 1990 continued them under Fritz Schwegler in Düsseldorf. Wishing to study abroad, he attended the Cité des Arts in Paris in 1992 and Goldsmiths College in London in 1993. Then in 1995 he worked as artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Demand reconstructs pictures from print media or television in their original size in paper and cardboard, and then photographs them with a large-format camera. With these images at several removes from reality he raises questions about the truthfulness of photography. Since the early 1990s his works have been shown at such notable venues as the Tate Gallery in London, the Fondation Cartier in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. In 2004 the artist represented Germany at the São Paulo Biennale. He was awarded a stipend by the Getty Research Institute and worked in Los Angeles in 2010 and 2011. Since 2011 Thomas Demand has been a professor at Hamburg’s fine arts academy, the Hochschule für bildende Künste. He lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles.
