Thomas Demand show highlights life recreated in cardboard

At first glance, French painter Claude Monet's work Water Lilies series comes to mind. However, Thomas Demand's incredibly life-like reproduction of these traditional symbols of purity and rebirth is in fact based on a reproduction of Monet's lily pond on Naoshima Island in Japan. Here, Demand continues to create life-size models in meticulous detail before photographing and then destroying them.

Bathed in garish pink lights, this is a cardboard recreation of a hydroponic lab belonging to the science campus of Niagara College in Ontario, where students pursue degrees in commercial cannabis production. This artwork underscores how a once frowned upon commercial activity is on track to becoming a legal and socially-acceptable multi-billion dollar business today.

"It is about an individual trying to shelter from everyone else around him — a kind of lighter take on the isolation of COVID," Demand said in a previous interview describing this picture of a tower of seemingly uniform balconies: except for the one with a fully extended canopy.

Besides creating and photographing his own models, Demand also photographed the creations of another artist, namely the late fashion designer Azzedine Alaïa. Several pictures show shots of the models and materials used in the world of fashion design. Here, markings and perforations on the cards and tracing paper reflect the practice of copying and reworking existing patterns.

Thomas Demand presents Alaïa's patterns as sculptural objects in the same way as he does with his own models. These fabric patterns are in this sense used to convey a series of ideas, a means of making sense of information — which is itself an art form, according to the artist: "Models reduce the complexity of reality to some key elements," says Demand.

"The use of models is everywhere. They're a beautiful rebuilding of our impression of the real world," says Demand, who began his career as a sculptor but eventually started photographing his life-size models following the advice of one of his tutors. The Thomas Demand exhibition at the Sprüth Magers gallery in London runs though May 15 - by previous appointment only in line with COVID measures.