Artist Thomas Demand creates images of realities that he himself reconstructs - By Bernhard Schulz

His complex game with reality has made Thomas Demand a star in the international art scene. The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin is currently showing some of the artist's works.

Thomas Demand's medium is photography. Does that make him a photographer? That is a matter for debate. The photographs in the exhibition are made using the Diasec process - often employed by art photographers. With formats of up to 2-by-3 meters, they correspond with the sizes shown in recent years - in particular, by the leading artists of the "Düsseldorfer school."

And yet there is a difference. It is not just any old difference but a huge and critical one. Demand does not photograph reality as he finds it - he constructs this reality himself. He spends months creating scenarios - almost all of them interiors - out of paper and cardboard. He then photographs the precisely-cut and carefully-lit scenes. Subsequently, he destroys that painstakingly-crafted paper reality. What remains are the photographs of a reality which, for its part, represents the image of real, physical reality.

Demand begins his work with photographs - thereby completing the cycle. When a photo has caught his attention, he tries to recreate the motif, in order to then capture it as the photograph of a now secondary reality. Therefore, Demand's images don't say so much about current or past reality - even if it is a sink filled with dirty dishes in a friend's apartment. Rather, they say something about our relationship with outward reality, formed as it is by photography.

Demand was born in Munich in 1964 and grew up in the Bavarian countryside. He describes himself as part of a generation that held a basic belief that things will always work out. Germans are not accustomed to using the term "baby boomer" but the fact is, Demand comes from the generation of people for whom life promised to simply go on getting better: "I think that a lot of those born after us had already lost that unbroken belief in the future," he says.

Since 1996, Demand has been living in Berlin where he quickly came to fame among the city's artists. His neighbors in the large studio building - a former factory - are Tacita Dean and Olafur Eliasson. Demand's status has been assured ever since he was commissioned to make a large work for the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art New York - and to hold a solo exhibition there the following year. His works sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars and because he - unlike others - cannot churn them out as if he were on a production line, there is a long waiting list of museums and galleries - not to mention private collectors.

Visitors at his current show in Berlin, who come with great expectations of German topics as the exhibition is called "Nationalgalerie" may be disappointed because Demand did not purposely plan a German theme among his works. "At the beginning, I am always surprised," Demand once said of the direction his work takes. About 40 works are on show in the upper hall of the Neue Nationalgalerie - representing one-third of Demand's entire oeuvre. The idea was "to only show pictures based on German themes," as it says in the correspondingly large-format catalogue.

What, then, is so very German in Demand's German motifs? Nothing really. If it were not for the title and the relevant details, who would think that "Raum" for instance was anything more than an office, in ruins, for whatever reason? In fact, the work is based on a photograph of Hitler's headquarters in the Wolfschanze, destroyed in the failed assassination attempt of July 20, 1944. And "Bushaltestelle" (bus stop) - what is special about that, if it was not recorded as a meeting place for the members of the then-unknown band, later successful as Tokio Hotel?

So the context supplied with the works plays an important role. You might say it is specifically German that the very addition of a highly meaningful context makes a work significant. But in fact, Demand's photographs stand alone - and even putting aside one's amazement at that effort that goes into making them, they are fantastically composed interiors. Any trace of immediate human action has been removed. There are no numbers, no writing - no sign of use at all. Only when you look closely do you become aware of the clinical purity that characterizes these scenes, as they are bathed in a constant, milky light.  

And when asked recently which glue he uses for the construction of his paper-and-cardboard scenes, Demand swore by a German favorite - the universal adhesive Uhu Alleskleber. If that is not a declaration of faith in the nation's traditions, what is?

Thomas Demand: "Nationalgalerie." 
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
Until Jan. 17, Tue., Wed., Sun. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.,
Thu. 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.,
Fri. to Sat. 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.,
admission ?8/4. www.smb.museum