Went to the Thomas Demand exhibition at the Nationalgallerie, aptly titled Nationalgallerie. I think it was the best thing I have seen so far on my World Tour 010. It set my brain on fire and made me understand Germany more.
The exhibition was designed specifically for the National Gallerie, the famous "temple of light and glass" designed by Mies van der Rohe. To block out the light that streams in from every angle Demand has framed this exhibition in miles of heavy felt curtaining hanging some 15 metres from the ground. It creates a theatricality that heightens the eerie 'not quite not rightness' of the giant dia-sec C prints.
For those not familiar with Demand's work - he creates life sized models of imagery he takes from photography and then rephotographs them using a medium format camera. The models are made from card board and there is no digital retouching. Every single component of the image is created from scratch.
Demand deletes humans, text and other details from his installations adding to their universality. Supposedly it makes it possible to read the images in many different ways.
For me I found the textual fragments that accompanied the imagery especially evocative. It was written specifically for the exhibition by dramaturgist by Botho Strauss.
"The image, after all, are like seals placed upon the invisible. But in some images there are empty spaces where the invisible has made notable inroads. It is present"
It is exactly the missing elements from Demand's work that make his imagery so 'present' and potent.
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