The Italian magazine Domus has long been a major force of architectural publishing. Founded by Gio Ponti in 1928, the magazine began planning for its 100 years anniversary already two years ago with an ambitious program of a decade of yearly guest editors. In 2020 the British architect David Chipperfield took on this function. Known in Berlin for his thoughtful reconstruction of the Neues Museum (1993-2009) and the more recent completion of the James-Simon-Galerie (1999-2018), Chipperfield collaborated with Thomas Demand who made all the magazine’s 10 covers for the year 2020.

Photo © Brigitte Lacombe

M Leuven is presenting HOUSE OF CARD, a major retrospective of the work of Thomas Demand, with contributions by Arno Brandlhuber, Martin Boyce, Caruso St John and Rirkrit Tiravanija. The exhibition is the first to concentrate in-depth on the role of architecture in Demand’s work.

Published on the occasion of Thomas Demand’s major solo exhibition at M Leuven, this book focuses on Demand’s relationship to architecture and his engagement with architects over almost fifteen years.

The Complete Papers is an extensive volume encompassing all of Thomas Demand’s work over the past 28 years, together with the primary texts written about his practice. The book includes previously unseen early works from 1990, together with reference reproductions on every one of his pieces.

Winner of the Best Book on Contemporary Art, Richard Schlagman Art Book Awards 2019.

Cardboard case with two volumes:
The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied. (exhibition catalogue)
Kong’s Finest Hour. A Chronicle of Connections (novel)

Working within the parameters of his established technique, Thomas Demand created carefully formed paper and card sculptures, a parallel world which is photographed and then destroyed. The Dailies offers only traces – signs of consumption, or the spectres of things left behind. His creations are based on things he saw and photographs he took while travelling and walking the street.

"Models are generally understood as filtered interpretations of the environment, without the distraction of a multitude of various stimulations. In architecture they lean toward the utopian, showing how much better things could be: neither details nor decay can obfuscate the splendor of the new development on display. My own association with models has often taken advantage of the untouched and timeless quality they can offer."
—Thomas Demand

The texts and images presented here are part of Blossom, a collaboration between the artist Thomas Demand and writer Ben Lerner. The images relate to a detail from a photograph of Katherine Russell, widow of Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev leaving her home in Boston, that first appeared in the New York Times on 4 May 2013.