Thomas Demand
The Object Lesson
Kaldor Public Art Project 38
Group Exhibition in an exhibition space created by Thomas Demand, with works by John Baldessari, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Gilbert & George, Andreas Gursky, Donald Judd, Frank Stella
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Through January 11, 2026

For the 38th Kaldor Public Art Project, John Kaldor has invited Thomas Demand to create an extraordinary exhibition space in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ Naala Badu building, specifically designed to display the John Kaldor Family Collection in a whole new light. Demand, who is well known for his photographs, has become deeply interested in architecture and exhibition design. For this project, he turns his attention to the artworks in the Kaldor Collection and to the Art Gallery’s SANAA-designed building. Demand is familiar with SANAA’s practice, having made a series of research visits to their Tokyo studio. This project has been closely informed by his research.

The project features renowned artists from the Kaldor Collection of over 200 works, including Francis Alÿs, Christo, Gilbert & George, Andreas Gursky, Sol LeWitt, Robert Rauschenberg, Ugo Rondinone and Saskia Olde Wolbers.

Mondi Possibili
Henni Alftan, John Baldessari, Cao Fei, Thomas Demand, Thea Djordjadze, Lucy Dodd, Robert Elfgen, Peter Fischli David Weiss, Sylvie Fleury, Jenny Holzer, Donald Judd, Karen Kilimnik, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, David Ostrowski, Michail Pirgelis, Sterling Ruby, Thomas Scheibitz, Andreas Schulze, Hyun-Sook Song, Robert Therrien, Rosemarie Trockel, Kaari Upson, Andrea Zittel
August 31–September 14, 2023
Seoul

Mondi Possibili highlights the interplay between art and design and explores the many ways in which experimentation with material, technique and scale can reveal the hidden narratives, quiet drama and humor in the everyday items that furnish our lives as well as our imaginations. Connected through a paradigm of the possible, all artworks on show examine familiar objects – citing, celebrating, adapting or appropriating them – offering surprising, playful or unsettling approaches that open up a range of “possible worlds.” This will be the fourth edition of Sprüth Magers’ Mondi Possibili – first titled by Pasquale Leccese – showcasing significant themes in the selected artists’ works as well as the gallery’s longstanding heritage. Its three previous iterations were presented in 1989, 2006 and 2007 in Cologne, where the gallery’s history is firmly rooted, and art and design have intersected for many decades.

Mies in Mind
John Bock, Thomas Demand, Thea Djordjadze, Jenny Holzer, Kraftwerk, Reinhard Mucha, Otto Piene, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Scheibitz
August 20–September 4, 2021
Berlin

As part of the exhibition parcours Mies In Mind, initiated by INDEX Berlin and taking place on the occasion of the reopening of the Neue Nationalgalerie, Sprüth Magers is showcasing works by John Bock, Thomas Demand, Thea Djordjadze, Jenny Holzer, Reinhard Mucha, Otto Piene, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Scheibitz in a group exhibition that pays tribute to the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his famous building.

GO FIGURE!?
Henni Alftan, John Baldessari, Cao Fei, George Condo, Diane Dal-Pra, Thomas Demand, Alex Foxton, Lenz Geerk, Elizabeth Glaessner, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Oscar yi Hou, Gary Hume, Clementine Keith-Roach, Karen Kilimnik, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Jo Messer, Pamela Rosenkranz, Sterling Ruby, Thomas Scheibitz, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Kara Walker, Andro Wekua
May 19–May 26, 2021

GO FIGURE!? is an online exhibition in collaboration with Ed Tang and Jonathan Cheung. It presents works by artists from Sprüth Magers roster alongside a selection of emerging artists from around the globe and across various media, aiming to welcome a playful dialogue between the exhibiting artists and works.

Thomas Demand
February 3–May 15, 2021
London

Thomas Demand’s fourth exhibition in the London gallery features new large format photographic works and a selection from the latest iteration of his Model Studies series

local talent
Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Miriam Böhm, Marieta Chirulescu, Tacita Dean, Thomas Demand, Thea Djordjadze, Jason Dodge, Sam Durant, Olafur Eliasson, Haris Epaminonda, Omer Fast, Ceal Floyer, Mathew Hale, Mathew Hale / Eddie Ruscha, Oliver Laric, Henrik Olesen, Manfred Pernice, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Anri Sala, Thomas Scheibitz, Andreas Slominski, Thomas Struth, Akinori Tao, Rosemarie Trockel, Corinne Wasmuht
July 4–August 22, 2020
Berlin

Thomas Demand
Archivmaterial / New Stop Motion
November 24, 2018–January 19, 2019
Berlin

In the past several years, Thomas Demand has periodically turned his camera away from the models he constructs himself, as content for his well-known photographs, to focus on models he has encountered in the archives and studios of renowned architects. Sprüth Magers is pleased to present ARCHIVMATERIAL, the third iteration of Demand’s contemplative series, which concentrates on models by the Viennese artist-architect Hans Hollein. Also on view NEW STOP MOTION, two of the artist’s mesmerizing stop motion animations completed in 2016 and 2018.

Thomas Demand
Latent Forms
October 13–December 19, 2015
London

Over the past two years, Thomas Demand has spent many hours in the Tokyo offices of renowned architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, or SANAA, observing their working processes. The result is a new series of large-scale close-up photographs that has its origins in 2011, when Demand came across the models of architect John Lautner, stored in the Getty Archive, Los Angeles. The series that emerged from that process, Model Studies, was the first time Demand photographed subjects other than his own life-sized reconstructions in paper.

Thomas Demand
Dailies 2008–2014
September 18–November 1, 2014
Berlin

Since 2008 Thomas Demand has been making the Dailies, a series of photographs developed from pictures he has taken on his camera phone. Best known for large-scale photographs of life-sized models built by the artist, which might portray an interior space linked to the news or recent history, the Dailies see Demand turn his attention to the overlooked details of everyday life.

Thomas Demand
September 7–October 20, 2012
Berlin

The highlight of this, Thomas Demand's first exhibition in the Berlin space is his most ambitious film project to date, Pacific Sun, based on a YouTube clip taken by CCTV on board a cruise ship caught in a vicious storm off the coast of New Zealand. The entire set and cast of varied objects which are seen to lurch from side to side in the film were recreated on a 1:1 scale out of paper and cardboard and choreographed in movement. The resulting two minute film is the sequenced animation of almost 3,000 photographs, capturing every minimal movement.

Thomas Demand
The Dailies
April 14–May 19, 2012
London

In this series of work – The Dailies – Demand captures everyday moments and objects. The artist started working on the series in 2008, using the camera on his phone to take images of peculiar arrangements he came across while carrying out his day to day activities. These observations were unrelated to mediated narratives or other references outside the image itself; they were there simply because the artist noticed them. These were then translated into paper sculptures and formally straightforward images, with no elaborate viewpoints, lighting or other tricks. The title The Dailies refers to the daily rushes from film, the leftover images from the cutting room floor.

Thomas Demand
Presidency
November 25, 2008–January 17, 2009
London

Following an invitation from the New York Times, Demand has created a timely and unnerving body of work which examines the literal and metaphorical seat of global power in the twenty-first century – the Oval Office in the White House, Washington, D.C. The Oval Office, the official workplace of the President of the United States of America, is one of the most instantly recognisable interior locations in the world, its image a symbolic shorthand for the exercise of ideological and geopolitical will. Yet Demand’s photographs, rather than capturing the original Oval Office in all its formal opulence, instead depict a meticulously recreated life-sized model, fabricated from paper, cardboard and confetti.

Mondi Possibili
Richard Artschwager, Benjamin Bergmann, Thomas Demand, Thea Djordjadze, Peter Fischli David Weiss, Claus Föttinger, Thomas Grünfeld, Stefan Kern, Frances Scholz, Andreas Schulze, Franz West, Martin Wöhrl
January 15–March 17, 2007
Cologne

Thomas Demand
May 5–July 7, 2000
Cologne

Thomas Demand
September 5–November 1, 1997
Cologne