Introduction

Thomas Demand's retrospective The Stutter of History at the Israel Museum will present about 70 works (photographs, films and wallpapers) spanning major aspects of the artist's oeuvre.

Thomas Demand has spent the last two and a half decades bringing together his talents as both a sculptor and a photographer in an attempt to capture the uncanny stutter of history that lies at the root of our contemporary image culture. Demand’s images may appear to depict the real world but upon closer inspection they resonate with a fragile similitude that belies the fact that they are actually photographs of his handmade three-dimensional sculptural recreations of found images culled from the media.

After choosing his source images, Demand uses colored paper and cardboard to painstakingly reconstruct the spaces that they depict in three dimensions at a one to one scale. He then photographs these scenarios and subsequently destroys his models leaving behind only the ghostly photographic doppelgänger.

Exhibition events

Gallery Talk 
Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History with exhibition curator Nirith Nelson
August 22 and September 6, 2023. 
Further information

The Stutter of History will tour to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, June – September 2024; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, November 2024 – March 2025. The exhibition was first presented at UCCA Edge, Shanghai in 2022 and Jeu de Paume, Paris in Spring 2023.

Thomas Demand
The Stutter of History
Israel Museum
Ayala Zacks Abramov Pavilion and Nathan Cummings Building for Modern and Contemporary Art
Derech Ruppin 11
Jerusalem
August 9, 2023 - February 10, 2024
www.imj.org.il