Description

On the heels of Thomas Demand’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York last year comes this show at London’s Serpentine Gallery. Demand photographs installations that he painstakingly builds for that purpose and destroys afterwards. These installations are made of colored paper, usually in 1:1 scale, and are developed from news photographs of the site of a crime or an historic event. These laconic abstractions, often hauntingly beautiful, pose central questions about media and representation, about the connection between spaces and the actions that happens in them, about the aesthetics of form and content. The exhibition brought together some older pieces that had already been part of the show in New York and his two latest projects “Klause” and “Grotto” (2006); “Klause” was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, in order to pair it with a newly found set of sketches by Max Beckmann for his “Apokalypse.” (Exhibition there until August 27.) “Klause” refers to a small bar in the German town or Burbach, the site of child molestation and murder, much discussed in the German press a few years back. As Demand’s images of the spaces and their details evoke Hannah Arendt’s notion of the ‘banality of evil,’ they also subtly but firmly change our perception of these everyday spaces and objects. The ivy covering the outside of Burbach’s Tosa Tavern was painstakingly recreated for one of Demand’s photographs. Demand then commissioned a wallpaper based on his image, which was produced by one of the most traditional British woodblock wallpaper manufacturers and applied to the walls of the Serpentine Gallery. It is also for sale there. In front of the gallery, Rem Koolhaas has built this year’s experimental pavilion, continuing a tradition that the Serpentine Gallery started 5 years ago. From translucent, lightweight materials, Koolhaas and his collaborator Cecil Balmond created an ephemeral folly in Kensington Gardens, whose enormous air inflated dome gives it the look of a hot air balloon about to take off. Inside, large prints of Thomas Demand’s Ivy wallpaper are suspended underneath the dome.

The sumptuous catalogue (Schirmer/Mosel) contains an essay by Beatriz Colomina and a conversation between Alexander Kluge, the German filmmaker and Thomas Demand.
The exhibition in Frankfurt is accompanied by the publication:
Andreas Bee (Ed.), Thomas Demand, “Klause” (texts in English and German). Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst

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Serpentine Gallery

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www.serpentinegallery.org

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