By Ann C. Collins, June 10, 2025
It is difficult to discern whether I am standing alone in a cave or a paper bag. I know that I have walked into a gallery in Chelsea, but what is seen disorients and confuses any certainty of place. The entire space, save for the windows, has been covered from floor to ceiling in photographic wallpaper onto which an image of crumpled kraft paper has been printed. The earthy tones darken the room and, unlike a white-box space in which the walls tacitly retreat from perception, foreground the fact that I am contained within something. Like Lascaux, Maltravieso, Lubang Jeriji Saléh—ancient and enduring sites in which image making within was magic—a series of very large, deeply saturated photographs hang on the gallery walls. But then again, considering the wall covering more closely, the craft paper becomes a paper bag, the perfect receptacle into which endless collections of things can be conveniently held, perhaps even an art exhibition and its viewer, before they are tossed away.
The tension between the two possibilities of permanence and transience is entrancing, as are the many dualities and riddles that run throughout Thomas Demand at Matthew Marks Gallery through June 28, which, including the printed wallpaper of “Fels/Rock” (2025), features eight new photographic works by the artist. For more than thirty years, the German-born artist has cultivated a practice that begins with handmade constructions of paper and cardboard that painstakingly replicate images gathered from the media or taken by Demand. The finished sculptural works are lit and photographed with no postproduction before they are printed; the resulting images function as documentation of the artist’s studio work as much as independent photographs. At the end of his process, Demand hires a team to dismantle and discard the sculptures in his absence. He returns to a pristine studio, empty and ready for his next model to be built.
The large-scale UV print “Demonstration” (2023) shows a sea of umbrellas interspersed with Israeli flags, likely inspired by news photos of a 2023 protest in Tel Aviv’s Habima Square surrounding Prime Minister Netanyahu’s attempts to weaken Israel’s Supreme Court. Compared to the news photos of the march online, Demand creates a more painterly version of things: the light in his image spills downward from the top of the frame, as if the procession were marching out of darkness towards its source. Soft diagonals run through the composition, giving it a sense of harmonious movement. Unlike its source image, Demand’s interpretation shows no indication of rain. Eschewing figurative representation, the umbrella acts as stand-in for both the collective and the individual. While the frame teams with classic black canopies, the occasional red, yellow, blue, or rainbow umbrella stands out.
“Ballroom” (2025) revisits a photograph released by the United States Justice Department in 2023 showing boxes of haphazard classified documents which held details of potential U.S. nuclear weapons programs and military attacks stacked up on a stage in a Mar-a-Lago ballroom. Demand’s paper details of the room’s decorative wall moldings and inlaid wood flooring could be considered a form of trompe l’oeil, and the irony that this is a visual deception, in this of all locations, is not lost. In “Ballroom” we see a carefully created image that mediates a news photo--- a picture snapped to quickly document--- a sloppy piling up of things in an empty room becomes uniform boxes stacked in neat rows across the stage.
Running eight feet in length, “Eis/Ice” (2025) depicts of a bird’s-eye view of a melting iceberg riddled with fissures. Expanses of flat, white paper indicate the surface of the ice while thinly cut layers of blue form the striations of its crevasses. The latest of Demand’s topological studies, “Eis/Ice” is at once a meditation on the nuance of color and a stark reminder of the fugitive state into which the planet is quickly falling. Topology defines the adjacency, connectivity, and containment of geographic features; Demand’s image traces the lines of separation that run through the formerly whole iceberg, but it also reveals the jigsaw seams that could almost be fused back together, at least by memory. Over the artist’s brown wallpaper, the blue and white UV print glows in the darkness that surrounds it, harmonizing with the cave-like image of cracks and crevices covering the walls, an exterior set against an interior, a juxtaposition of that which has endured and that which is vanishing. It’s all so beautiful, it’s all falling apart.
“Memorial” (2025), another large-scale UV print, is an evocation of a sudden roadside memorial where an unexpected loss of life is marked by offerings from the community: flowers, candles piled around a telephone pole. If Demand’s many bouquets (I counted more than thirty) allude to traditions that employ paper flowers as symbols of enduring memory, they also present a stark depiction of the transitory state of all things, even grief. The petals of his flowers are crushed and beginning to wilt. The wicks of the many tea candles scattered around the site are blackened from use and the wax is melted down. Our most urgent attempts to hold our memories prove fugitive and inevitably, forgotten. Even Demand’s photographs, I remind myself, are really just views of work that has already been torn down and destroyed, windows looking back onto something already lost.
Ann C. Collins is a writer whose work has appeared in Art Forum Education, Variable West, and The Brooklyn Rail, where she is an editor-at-large. She holds an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing from the School of Visual Arts.
THOMAS DEMAND "Ballroom", 2025. © Thomas Demand / Artists' Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.
THOMAS DEMAND "Demonstration", 2013. © Thomas Demand / Artists' Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.
THOMAS DEMAND "Eis", 2025. © Thomas Demand / Artists' Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.
THOMAS DEMAND "Melonen/Melons", 2025. © Thomas Demand / Artists' Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.
THOMAS DEMAND "Memorial" 2025. © Thomas Demand / Artists' Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.