Born in Munich in 1964, Demand originally took up photography while studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf as a way to document his sculptures—ephemeral paper reconstructions of everyday objects. Soon, he turned the tables and began building paper sculptures for the sole purpose of photographing them. This became the basis of his entire artistic practice.

Demand selects his source imagery from the media, recreates those often-banal images as life-size models using colored paper and cardboard, photographs them, and prints them at a monumental scale. Afterward, he destroys his models, leaving behind only the ghostly photographic doppelgänger. Ultimately, his works are as much about the circulation of images and the politics of memory as they are about the specific moments depicted. The “stutter of history” lies in the strange gap between the world we inhabit and the recreated world of paper and cardboard that the artist conjures in his studio.

Douglas Fogle is an independent curator and writer based in Los Angeles. He is currently working on the launch of KINOPOP, an itinerant platform for exhibiting and commissioning works in the realms of moving images, music, architecture design and visual arts. Fogle has held curatorial positions at institutions, including the Hammer Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Centre. His current and past exhibitions have included, among others, Transmissions at Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles; Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History (multiple venues, 2022–25); Luisa Lambri: Autoritratto, Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2021); Life on Mars, The 55th Carnegie International (2008); and The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1962–1984, Walker Art Center (2003).