German artist Thomas Demand's grandfather was a prominent, Bauhaus-influenced architect who played a pivotal role designing buildings in Munich following World War II. Although Demand grew up in West Berlin, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, surrounded spatially by his familial legacy in the late 1980s. Since earning his master's degree in fine arts from Goldsmiths College in London in 1994, Demand has established himself as a sculptor, photographer, filmmaker, curator, and professor of considerable renown.
Demand specializes in producing large-format photographs of certain actual places, which are often historically or socially important, as well as wholly imagined physical environments. For the latter, he painstakingly constructs elaborate, full-scale sculptures that serve as models for his photographs. Yet once the sculptures have been rendered through his lens, Demand destroys his constructions. This effacement of his artistic process serves both to elevate his compositions and destabilize the supposed objectivity of the photographic medium itself.
Suggestive of a computer-generated architectural drawing, Fabrik (mit Namen), 1994 is a chromogenic print Diasec mounted to acrylic from a limited edition of 5 that presents an idealized yet mundane factory, inspired by a power station adjacent to a motorway. As with nearly all of Demand's works, there are no figures present, but human ingenuity and the economic sphere are nonetheless evoked. Viewed from another angle, the looming industrial structure might appear to resemble a sleek ocean liner in port. Demand thus conjures the overriding imperatives of faceless capital while evoking how individual agents seek escape routes within the overshadowing confines of the marketplace. Curiously, other examples within this edition bear eponymous, commercial lettering, DEMAND, on the light façade of the factory, whereas this print does not, making the dreamlike impression all the more abstract.
