Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History

Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History
Museum of Fine Arts Houston – Until Sep 15, 2024 Beck Building Houston (US)

At first, the images Thomas Demand creates seem to depict the real world. A closer look, however, reveals that they are actually photographs of temporary sculptural re-creations.

News media.

Demand often selects his source imagery from the news media, and he re-creates those images as life-size models using colored paper and cardboard. Then he photographs the images and prints them at a monumental scale.

Afterward, Demand destroys his models, leaving behind only their ghostly photographic doubles. The “stutter of history” evoked by the exhibition’s title lies in that strange gap between the real world and the re-created world of paper and cardboard that the artist conjures in his studio.

The Stutter of History.

The internationally touring exhibition Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History is a landmark retrospective of the artist’s work, and the MFAH is the only U.S. venue.

The 2011 nuclear disaster.

Born in Germany in 1964, Demand depicts places loaded with historical meaning—the abandoned control room of the Fukushima plant following the 2011 nuclear disaster; the site of the Florida recount of the 2000 American presidential election; Bill Gates’s dorm room at Harvard. Ultimately, Demand’s works are as much about the circulation of images and the politics of memory as they are about the specific moments depicted.

Museum of Fine Arts Houston→  Audrey Jones Beck Building, 5601 Main Street Houston, TX, USA 77005

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