Thomas Demand (b. 1964)
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more
Thomas Demand (b. 1964)

Stall/Stable

Details
Thomas Demand (b. 1964)
Stall/Stable
signed, dated and numbered twice 'Thomas Demand 2000 3/6' (on the reverse)
chromogenic colour print face-mounted on Diasec
43 x 49¼in. (109.2 x 125cm.)
Executed in 2000, this work is number three from an edition of six
Provenance
RSC Contemporary, London.
Anon. sale, Phillips de Pury & Co. New York, 11 November 2005, lot 168.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.
Literature
Thomas Demand, exh. cat., Paris, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, 2000-2001 (another from the edition illustrated, p. 65).
A. Ruby, "Thomas Demand, Memoryscapes", in Parkett, no. 62, 2001 (unpaged).
Thomas Demand, exh. cat., Hannover, Sprengel Museum, 2001 (another from the edition illustrated in colour, on the front cover).
Thomas Demand, exh. cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2005 (another from the edition illustrated in colour, p. 93).
Exhibited
New York, 303 Gallery, Thomas Demand, 2001 (another from the edition exhibited).
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.

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Lot Essay

'The concept of constructing a reality in the studio is much stronger than faking things for the camera. They are genuine sculptures, documented. I make my decisions about objects first, the second step is to photograph them.' (The artist quoted in 'Vik Muniz/Thomas Demand, A Conversation', in Thomas Demand, Freiburg in Marienbad 1998, p. 44).
Stall/Stable is a work emblematic of Demand's approach to his sculptural and photographic processes. Since the 1980s, Demand has been preoccupied with the process of constructing replicas of objects and environments in his studio and subsequently photographing them. Often crafting these entities out of completely non-functional materials - such as a refrigerator out of cardboard or curtain blinds out of paper - Demand is a skillful master of mimicry and illusions. For Stall/Stable, Demand has reconstructed a setting full of disheveled hay. Made out of paper and cardboard, its colour, surface texture and weight all mirror dried grass faithfully in every way. Yet, from this seemingly simple concept, a multi-layered reading of Demand's work can be derived.
His masterful imitation of the hay nods to traditional Renaissance art forms in art history where achieving the exact representation of the original subject was championed, such as Michaelangelo's sculpture of David. Moreover, his productions of banal objects from everyday life echoes the Duchampian discussion on ready-made objects. While his sculptures resemble found objects, the painstaking process of making them is subversive of the ready-made discourse. Most interestingly, Demand's photographic documentation of the haystack negotiates Walter Benjamin's famous essay in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in 1935. It stirs the viewer to consider the notion of authenticity and the 'aura' of the art object-first put forth by Benjamin--where it is reproduced and removed from its cultural, historical and political setting, and is 'reactivated' in a new environment. In all these ways, Stall/Stable resonates with different potent artistic discussions, and together with his contemporaries such as Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer and Bernd and Hilla Becher, Demand provides radical interpretations of and insight into the role of photography in the landscape of contemporary art.

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