Thomas Demand, Fondation Cartier
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain Paris, France 2000–2001
Client: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
Thomas Demand, whose medium is photography and film, preferred not to show his work in the basement gallery at the Fondation Cartier – where walls and controllable lighting would have made for a conventional installation – and favoured the more visible ground floor gallery, where there are no walls and no control over daylight.
The walls of the exhibition are full-height screens, running parallel from one glazed wall to the other and placed perpendicular to the street, so that the transparency of the building to the garden is not interrupted. Like the elements of the building, the screens are thin and lined with paper. Each surface has a different colour so that, from any one viewpoint, a range of colours is seen together. The colours give the ground floor a vaguely inhabited feeling from the street, akin to the walls of a house whose façade has been removed.
Within the exhibition, the works are spatially located in relation to the colours and large openings. The paper-thin wall surfaces are soft, like the papers sometimes glimpsed in the illusions constructed by the artist. Seen from the front, the dark colours of the walls are not visible in the highly reflective surfaces of the photographs. Seen from the side, the works are sometimes obscured by sky reflection from the high windows.
Credits
Location
Paris, France
Date
2000-2001
Client
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
Caruso St John Architects
Adam Caruso, Peter St John
Photography
André Morin