An expanded new edition of one of artist Thomas Demand’s most celebrated series, collecting all his Dailies works to date. These intricate artworks are based on everyday moments captured on Demand’s iPhone, creating a haunting cumulative portrait of the details of modern life. With an extended essay by renowned art critic Hal Foster.
The Dailies collects snapshots of a world unmistakably our own yet equally strange. Made through Thomas Demand’s renowned practice of constructing, photographing, and destroying meticulous paper models, this series captures minor, everyday moments based on iPhone photographs. Viewed together, they are an inventory of traces–signs of consumption, evidence of people just departed or out of sight, spectres of things left behind. Demand describes the series as a form of Haiku: simple fragments strung together to inspire reflection and help us take stock of our daily lives. Just as they trigger deja vu through their performed, minimal repetition, they ask us to look again, and afresh, to discover an ordinary yet enlightening beauty. This new volume brings together the entirety of Demand’s series to date in an expanded edition interwoven with an extended essay by critic Hal Foster.
Thomas Demand (b. 1964, Munich, Germany) attended the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich (1987–1990), the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1990–1993), Goldsmiths College in London (1993–1994), and since 2011 has held a Professorship of Sculpture at HFBK in Hamburg. His work has been shown extensively across the world and is included in most of the significant private and institutional collections. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Sprüth Magers in Berlin, Galleria Gentili in Florence, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Serpentine Gallery in London, and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Demand was a recipient of the Rencontres d’Arles Award 2003 and was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2011. Recent books include The Stutter of History (2022), Mundo De Papel (2022), House of Card (2020), The Complete Papers (2018), Blossom with Ben Lerner (2015) and Model Studies (2011).
Hal Foster teaches and publishes in the areas of modernist and contemporary art, architecture, and theory. He is Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton and co-editor of October, to which he regularly contributes as well as to publications including Artforum and The London Review of Books. He is the recipient of Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism in College Art Association in 2012 and the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing in 2010, and he has been the Siemens Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and the Paul Mellon Senior Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In 2018 he delivered the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery.
