Thomas Demand
Refuge
MARe/Museum of Recent Art
Bulevardul Primăverii 15
Bucharest 011971
December 15, 2021 – March 14, 2022
Opening: December 15, 7 pm (EET)
www.mare.ro

Special event:
December 15, 6 pm – Artist talk: Thomas Demand, moderated by Erwin Kessler, MARe/Museum of Recent Art, Bucharest


The exhibition Refuge by Thomas Demand is organized within the framework of the long-standing cultural partnership between MARe/Museum of Recent Art, Bucharest, and the Goethe-Institut Bucharest.

Acclaimed Berlin-based artist Thomas Demand has created a carefully crafted body of work using the tools of photography to create a stark and eerie world of almost real-looking, but thoroughly imagined and constructed environments and situations. His seemingly clean and unassuming, un-rhetorical images are the result of a sophisticated process of mimicking ordinary normality and sheer banality. Thomas Demand's seemingly unproblematic, light-footed and unobtrusive photographs deal with a deep problem of perception and understanding. His work draws out archetypal settings and places of today, including critical figures and models of the standard and iconic routines of contemporary life, of ordinary urban living and daily office work, of factory work and hotel or apartment life, of travel and science, and of politics and lifestyle.

On view will be Refuge (I to V), a recent series of works from 2021 that deals with the description of potential places of refuge, places of apparent safety and protection that at the same time show loneliness, alienation and fear. The exhibition will also feature the complementary video Camera from 2007 (duration, 140 min).

Prior to the opening on December 15, an artist talk with Thomas Demand will be moderated by Erwin Kessler, from 6 pm, at MARe/Museum of Recent Art, Bucharest, presenting to the public the artistic, technical and conceptual stakes of Thomas Demand and an overview of the evolution of his artistic practice.