Thomas Demand
Junior Suite, 2012
chromogenic print
image: 139.7 x 114.94 cm (55 x 45 1/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of the Heather Podesta Collection

German artist Thomas Demand’s (b. 1964) singular oeuvre merges sculpture and photography and typically relies on found images.

The artist, who lives in Berlin and Los Angeles, painstakingly reconstructs the found photographs as three-dimensional, usually life-size models made of paper and cardboard before expertly lighting and photographing them with a large-format camera. The models are destroyed once the work process is complete. He studied at the Düsseldorf Academy and Goldsmiths' College, London

Demand’s provocative photograph Junior Suite (2012) comments on the irreverent nature of tabloid photography and immense public interest in celebrity tragedy. Responding to the obsessive media frenzy surrounding the overdose death of Whitney Houston in 2012, Demand was shocked by the publication of one picture that depicted the room service table where Houston had been eating moments before she died. In an interview with the New York Times in 2012, Demand commented: “The proliferation of that kind of image at the time when she was not even in the coffin amazed me. It amazed me that it would ever have been released.” The presence of such a photograph begs the question “is nothing sacred'”.

He recreated the scene using colored paper, then photographed the highly crafted fabrication before destroying it.  This image is part of the photography collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

Junior Suite disrupts the illusion of intimacy created by the tabloid image, often referred to as Houston’s “last supper,” and instead reveals the morbid invasion of privacy it signifies.

Thomas Demand