Thomas Demand Badezimmer, 1997

Bathroom (Beau Rivage) is one of Thomas Demand's most famous paintings and probably one of the artist's most reproduced works. The picture is based on a photograph of the hotel room in Geneva's Beau Rivage, in which Uwe Barschel was found dead in the bathtub. Bathroom (Beau Rivage) exemplifies Demand’s practice of extracting an image from the media, in early works often one that represents a culturally, politically or historically important site or crime scene, and emptying it of its human inhabitants and other details such as writing or signs of wear or decay.