Artist Enoc Perez in his home, photographed by Maryam Eisler

Borne of 1980s New York amongst the backdrop of Warhol, Basquiat, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Puerto Rican artist Enoc Perez has spent his decades-long career exploring questions of identity, heritage, and the urban landscape. LUX Contributing Editor Maryam Eisler talks to him about love, the ‘second phase of life’, and art in the current climate

Maryam Eisler: We’re sitting in your summer studio in East Hampton.

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Enoc Perez: I call it the two-car garage; it’s a studio where my children used to run in as children. This is also where I learned how to make sculptures. I’ve even made little pastoral paintings, something I would not normally do.

ME: Is it a place of experimentation?

EP: It’s my lab. This is a place where I knew nobody would see anything when I first bought it, so I could work privately.

Enoc Perez’s studio, photographed by Maryam Eisler

ME: Your sanctuary.

EP: Sanctuary it was. It’s also about the dreams you dream of. When I was studying art as a young guy, I would see Picasso’s studios in the South of France with Paloma and Paolo, his children, running around. Think of the pictures of Julian Schnabel, with him coming out of the water. I wanted somewhere with a pool, where I could go swim and come back to the studio and work, with my family around, because I personally don’t like to stop working. I feel guilty when I don’t work!

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ME: You told me earlier that this is now the second phase of life; talk to me about your beginnings.

EP: I came here when I was 19 years old from Puerto Rico. I wanted to come here and my dad insisted on that too – if I was going to study art, I had to go to America. He was right. When I graduated at 22, the whole challenge was how to get seen in a city that has so many artists.

It was 1986. Jean-Michel [Basquiat] was still working. I was there. I witnessed it all.

Enoc Perez’s ‘Luquillo Beach, Puerto Rico’, painted in 2025

ME: What was New York like in the 80s?

EP: It was dangerous. It was crazy. You remember The World? You remember all those clubs? It was so exciting. I didn’t even have a style, because I came from suburbia in Puerto Rico, so I pretty much looked like the Sears catalogue!

ME: You were a clean slate, ready to absorb.

EP: At first, I did my own interpretations of Jean-Michel Basquiat because he was the best. Until I realised that I had to do something that nobody else had attempted or wanted to do, especially as a Puerto Rican. In the early 90s, Felix Gonzalez-Torres started to come to prominence, and he was a game changer – how he saw sculpture and art was mind blowing. I noticed that Felix would be placed into contemporary art auctions, not in Latin American sales. That’s when I decided I didn’t want to be separated.

So, I decided to win the contemporary. Then came questioning of the method. How would I communicate with my audience using a universal language? I looked at Warhol, Rauschenberg, Richard Prince: they all used printmaking in the painting process, especially Warhol and Rauschenberg. That’s when I started doing transfers of drawings.

Enoc Perez’s oil on canvas ‘My Mother’s Kitchen’, 2025

It’s like a primitive way of printing. This gave me the relationship I wanted with the New York masters. I wasn’t using any brushes. It was very American. People at the time said they looked like Warhol silkscreens. My sister was working at Ralph Lauren at the time, and I went to pick her up one day for dinner and I noticed they had a colour copier. I opened the machine and it had four colours, the basic colour separation. I thought it would be cool if I used these colours to make my images too. That’s when I started adding layers to my monochromatic canvases.

ME: And that’s how your personal style developed?

Read more: A tribute to Don Bryant

EP: When I started using colours, I knew I had something. I was throwing a house party once, and people were just getting wasted, but they noticed a little painting hanging on the wall. I thought to myself: ‘okay, this is going to work’. I had these non-art and wasted guys actually talking about my art!

I started making paintings of other people’s girlfriends. I was recently divorced. I was angry, so I would take a picture of a couple and cut the guy out. They were paintings about envy, anger and desire. Everything happens because of love. The architecture came up when I first met my now-wife Carole who was married at the time.

Carole’s heels sitting next to the family swimming pool in East Hampton, photographed by Maryam Eisler

ME: Love is everything.

EP: Isn’t it? It’s probably the most basic motivation. But when you’re already in love you have to become more conceptual and talk about intellectual matters.

So, I met Carole. She was married to some other guy, but I wanted to do a show about her, and I decided to do a show in code. This was 2003. I thought to myself, ‘what am I going to do?’. I have a good library of architecture books. There’s a hotel in Puerto Rico called the Normandie. The story of that hotel goes back to the Puerto Rican guy who built it. He had a French wife – a singer. He built a boat for her, but that didn’t work out, so she wasn’t too impressed. Then he built this building based on the famous Normandie liner boat. I said to myself, ‘I am a Puerto Rican and I’m in love with a French woman. This painting will be a portrait of her’. And that was that!

Read more: In conversation with Henry Lumby of Auriens Chelsea

ME: Tony Shafrazi: tell me about him.

EP: Tony? He came in because of the buildings! The works were intellectual and I knew they would spark an interest in someone like him. This was after 2001; we all became painfully aware of the symbols that architecture signalled. Especially after September 11. My architectural symbols were inspired by love. Then, I started thinking about the Caribbean and Latin America, with all their international modernist buildings with beautiful architecture – all symbols of colonisation.

A close-up of Perez’s materials found in his studio, photographed by Maryam Eisler

ME: When did Tony notice your work?

EP: I had a German dealer at the time who took me to Art Basel. He called me and told me ‘Oh, these two guys bought your paintings – all of them!’. He wouldn’t tell me who at first. Anyway, months went by and then he told me, ‘Well, it was Peter Brant and Tony Shafrazi’. At that time, I was starting to join forces with Elizabeth Dee in New York, so she put Tony in contact with me, and the rest is history. Tony even came to our wedding.

ME: Do you regard Shafrazi as your godfather?

EP: He’s a godfather to a lot of artists. But, for me, he was my refinement school. He’s the guy who tells me, ‘No, you cannot do that’, or, ‘Think about it a little more’, or, ‘Challenge me’. He understands art like no one I know. Peter Brant, too. We became friends; Peter commissioned a portrait of Stephanie Seymour. These two men are blessings in my life.

ME: Let’s move to your paintings of beautiful sensual women. You told me that you felt there’s no room for showing these works now? Why not?

EP: I would get killed. I mean, I’m a 56-year-old straight guy. It doesn’t look good and people would criticise me.

‘Ponce Intercontental’, 2023. For Perez, architecture is richly embedded with symbols of love, as well as modernism and colonialism

ME: Do you self-censor?

EP: Well, there’s some degree of self-censoring. But with art, you can store it and bring it out when the time is right. Carlo Mollino has been an inspiration; he found a way to show the female nude in his polaroids in a tasteful and carnal way. There is always that fine line between good and bad taste, and I love him for walking that line.

ME: So, elegant and sensual can go hand in hand?

EP: Yes – look at Mollino’s interiors and what he was able to accomplish with them. He made beautiful polaroids that were found after he died. They will remain a mystery and I think of them as ghosts. Even in my own paintings inspired by his work, I soon thought to myself, ‘Oh my god, they look like ghosts’. They’re an archetype, and as we know, all creativity stems from the female.

‘After Mollino (18)’ by Enoc Perez (2019), inspired by Mollino’s ghost-like polaroids and interiors

ME: Female is creation. Female gives birth. Female inspires.

EP: Yes, quite literally. If you look at Mollino’s national theatre in Torino, it looks like a vagina – the most beautiful thing. It’s also very powerful.

ME: Do you think the art world looks down on all matters ‘beautiful’?

EP: Seduction is mostly looked down upon, at least in my experience in the art world. The current moment reminds me of the mid-90s, when art became so political. My attitude to that was, and still is, that I think it’s necessary. Personally, I want to inspire. I want to make art that has soul. That, to me, is more mysterious than making just a statement or offering a one-liner. I am active politically in my community, but art is about love for me.

‘Untitled’ made by Perez with oil on canvas in 2024

ME: I also sense this idea of bygone past, some sort of melancholic nostalgia in your work, or a nod to sentimental elegance of the past which we seem to have lost today.

EP: I don’t know if it’s nostalgia. I think it’s about wanting to reclaim a time that only belongs to me.

ME: Your representation of this time looks a bit disjointed, like fragmented memories.

EP: It’s fractured, kind of like myself. When I started to do the Rum Paintings, for example, those were self-portraits. I was an alcoholic at the time.

ME: When did you become sober?

EP: When I had my first son, Leo. My wife went on a girls night out, and I stayed behind to take care of him. I almost dropped him while I was changing his diaper because I was so drunk. The day after, I made an appointment with a psychiatrist. It turns out that I’m OCD, and I was self-medicating. I’m now 17 years sober, and I can only now revisit my paintings from that time.

Perez in his studio, with his process captured by Maryam Eisler

ME: Addiction undeniably is very present in the creative community. What has sobriety done for you? How has it affected your life and work?

EP: The positive side is that sobriety allowed me to be a normal, better father to my children. Also, it has allowed me to properly look at my work in greater depth. I did a project for the Dallas Contemporary about the architect Philip Johnson. When I started studying him and found out about his Nazi activity, I called Tony [Shafrazi] and told him ‘I don’t know if I can do this. This guy was a piece of shit’. He replied, ‘I agree with how you feel, but it’s your job as an artist to critique and to tell the story’. That allowed me to get through the show, but afterwards, I didn’t want to do any more architecture paintings. Think about Johnson’s Glass House. The Glass House is an important piece of architecture for American culture. It was inspired by a house bombed to the ground that Johnson saw while visiting a Hitler rally in Poland. I mean come on!

Read more: At the ICE St Moritz, the world’s most glamorous car show

ME: Where do you find your inspiration today?

EP: I did some of my best paintings in my thirties, so how do I access the person that I was then? That was part of turning 50. At this point, I am competing against myself!

ME: But you are painting as you did, with sobriety. The canvas is ultimately your own skin. I am very intrigued by your use of calligraphy; even that is of the past.

‘Untitled’, 2024, oil on canvas

EP: Maybe I am allowing myself to do that more today. I am having a show in Hong Kong with Ben Brown with my Rum Paintings and I have used words like ‘Go Bananas’, encouraging the alcoholic to get worse! Or ‘it’s nice to know you’re loved amongst friends’ shown with empty bottles. Poetic, right?

ME: Poetic while it’s happening. Perhaps not so poetic the day after!

EP: I also still love the old advertisements. They look like Morandi’s still lives; they’re just like pop art. But ultimately, I like the landscapes because they’re very real, like fragmented memories. The landscape is the only thing for me that is real. And I see it as mine. The Caribbean is mine.

ME: At the end of the day, it’s your world, your imagination, your brain! You allow yourself that privilege. In this world of ours, you cannot control a lot of things. One thing you can control is you.

EP: Understanding the moment, I understand the freedom of being exactly who I think I am.

“Roth Bar” Hauser & Wirth St Moritz, 2022-2023, by Björn, Oddur and Einar Roth

As Vice President of Artnet, LUX Contributing Editor Sophie Neuendorf has a unique view of upcoming events in the art world. Here is her pick of seven shows to visit this season

Sophie Neuendorf

“Roth Bar”, Hauser & Wirth, St Moritz 
This is a fully working bar designed by Björn, Oddur and Einar Roth, son and grandsons of Dieter Roth, who first ideated the bar in the 1980s. Presented alongside a rare self portrait by Dieter Roth, this Alpine gallery iteration is a dynamic and ever-changing installation and an example of the Roths’ cross-generational practice. This exhibition uses the gallery’s ground-floor space as a hub for music, talks, readings and simply getting together.

Until 9 September 2023; hauserwirth.com

“After the Mediterranean”, Hauser & Wirth, Menorca
This profound exhibition is curated by Oriol Fontdevila. It features seven artists whose works address the human and ecological challenges affecting the Mediterranean region, as well as the human capacity to solve them.

Excerpt from The Dido Problem, 2021, by Huniti Goldox

Hauser & Wirth Menorca, Illa del Rei

Until 29 October 2023; hauserwirth.com

“Basquiat x Warhol. Painting Four Hands”, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris 
Not only is this an incredible space (designed by starchitect Frank Gehry), the exhibition promises to be one of the most notable of 2023, with the dynamic duo having created more than 160 artworks together. Also featured will be individual works, and pieces by major figures such as Jenny Holzer and Kenny Scharf, to evoke the energy of New York’s downtown art scene in the 1980s.

Dos Cabezas, 1982, by Jean-Michel Basquiat

Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

Until 28 August 2023; fondationlouisvuitton.fr

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“Georgia O’Keefe: To See Takes Time”, MoMa, New York 
Following the Thyssen-Bornemisza’s survey in 2021, this exhibition explores a different side to the groundbreaking modernist. O’Keeffe is known for her unique paintings of desert flowers and cow skulls, but MoMA focuses on abstract works on paper made with watercolour, pastel, charcoal and graphite, with associated paintings shown alongside.

Evening Star No III, 1917, by Georgia O’Keeffe

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Until 12 August 2023; moma.org

“Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody”, The Broad, Los Angeles 
Astonishingly, Haring has never been given a museum show in the City of Angels. Inspired by Haring’s personal journals, the exhibition will highlight his engagement with social issues, such as nuclear disarmament, capitalism, apartheid and the AIDS crisis. There will also be interactive elements, such as a gallery infused with the sounds of one of Haring’s own playlists.

Red Room, 1988, by Keith Haring

The Broad, LA

Until 8 October 2023; thebroad.org

“Marina Abramović”, Royal Academy of Arts, London
I am a huge fan of Marina Abramović, so I’m thrilled she is getting a major retrospective at the RA in London this autumn. One of a number of artists, including Vito Acconci and Chris Burden, who experimented with using the body as a medium in the 1970s, Abramović pushes physical and mental boundaries to explore themes of emotional and spiritual transfiguration. The show includes physical performances of iconic works.

Portrait of Marina Abramović

Burlington House, Royal Academy of Arts, London

23 September-10 December 2023; royalacademy.org.uk

“Women Masters, Old and Modern”, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional, Madrid
From this autumn, the Thyssen-Bornemisza shines a spotlight on ten women artists across four centuries, including Artemisia Gentileschi, Mary Cassatt and Sonia Delaunay. Curated from a feminist perspective, the show focuses on groups of artists and gallerists who shared values and socio-cultural conditions and were able, despite the patriarchy, to establish alternative gazes.

Read more: Patrick Sun on LGBTQ artists in Asia

Portia Wounding Her Thigh, 1664, by Elisabetta Sirani

Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional, Madrid

31 October 2023-4 February 2024; museothyssen.org

This article was first published in the Spring/Summer 2023 issue of LUX

Shanyan Koder is the founder of HUA gallery and Shanyan Koder Fine Art

From a very young age, art has been a fundamental part of Shanyan Koder’s life. Here, the founder of Shanyan Koder Fine Art and Hua gallery speaks to LUX Contributing Editor, Samantha Welsh, about how technology has changed the art world and her charitable efforts beyond art.

LUX: How did your upbringing give you an insight into art and collecting?
Shanyan Koder: My family instilled my passion in fine art. I grew up attending auctions with my parents at Sotheby’s and Christie’s and bid on works from the Impressionist and Modern art sales.  It was very organic and natural.

LUX: What brought about the change of career plan?
SK: I graduated with a law degree from Cambridge, worked at Goldman Sachs, then moved to Sotheby’s in New York, London and Hong Kong. After several years, as I took a more prominent role in representing my family’s art collection, I decided to pursue my passion in fine art. After my time at Sotheby’s London, I left to set up my own private art advisory business, Shanyan Koder Fine Art and my Chinese contemporary art business HUA, a platform celebrating a combination of my Chinese heritage and my passion for contemporary art.

In collaboration with various artists, Mango is creating five digital artworks in NFT format based on five works including those of Miró

LUX: What helped you stand out as an authoritative collector and dealer in the crowded impressionist to contemporary space?
SK: I was fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time. Apart from my boss, Patti Wong, the Chairwoman of Sotheby’s Asia, I was the only other Chinese speaking employee in Sotheby’s on New Bond Street.  I bid for telephone bidders from Asia who required translation, be it for a Mouton Rothschild wine collection, a Ron Arad design table, paintings by Monet, Miró, Picasso, Warhol or Lichtenstein.  That was how I met Asian collectors who wanted to buy Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art overseas.

LUX: What compelled you to seek advisory roles at Unit London and Eye of the Collector?
SK: I became a Board Member for Unit London becasue I found their business model ground-breaking in a traditional art world and I wanted to be involved in the journey of one of the art world pioneers of the digital age. Using social media to promote artists was a new concept and aligned with how I liked to work. My role at Eye of the Collector came about as Nazy Vassegh, the founder, is a long-time friend whom I knew from Sotheby’s and she invited me to join her Advisory Council.  Their second edition launched in May 2022.

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LUX: You were an early adopter of tech to facilitate China/Europe crossover collecting. How did you do this?
SK: In the 2000s, collectors shifted away from needing the see the original artwork before buying. That was the real break for me in the ability to adopt tech to facilitate China/Europe crossover collecting.  My first sale completed on email was a Warhol.  As social media began to take-off, I sold via platforms such as WhatsApp, WeChat, Instagram, and so on.

The most recent sale of a waterlilies artwork by Claude Monet was sold at Sotheby’s for $70.4 million in May 2021

LUX: What was behind your co-founding of Global Showcases?
SK: Global Showcases is a ‘by invitation only’ UHNW luxury app-based sales platform. My co-founders and I decided that there was a gap in the market for buyers and brands in the “beyond luxury” space. These are assets, collectibles and experiences, for instance, art, real estate, yachts and accessories, aircraft, performance cars, high jewellery, limited edition watches. This is going to be an interesting space as the crypto world continues to develop.

LUX: How did Artemis come about and why is this disruptive to the crypto industry from a sustainability perspective?
SK: Artemis Market is the world’s first decentralised NFT mobile social platform. It uses Solana as the crypto currency which is more sustainable from an environmental perspective.  I was invited to be the first Brand Ambassador and was excited to accept. As the world continues to move towards crypto currency trading, NFTs are fast becoming a new asset class for collectors.

Shanyan hosted an art x fashion evening for Borne Charity in collaboration with the Unit London. Image courtesy of Shanyan Koder

LUX: How did entrepreneurship and social connection bring about your work with the NHS?
SK: I suffered the loss of three unborn babies during pregnancy and the grief, the spiritual, physical and mental impact are beyond words. As a result, I have supported Borne, a leading scientific research foundation in the field of preterm labour and premature birth.  Via Borne, I met fellow Borne Ambassador, an ex-SAS military officer, Jason Fox, and his SAS friend Richard Bassett.

Read more: Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation: Bridging Global South And North

We discussed PTSD caused by mental trauma from losing a baby and from experiencing combat. This was the start of our partnership and co-founding Mentor360, your pocket mentor. This App launched on World Mental Health Day on October 2021. It is a safe space to help people focus on mental fitness, holistic wellbeing, mindfulness and performance. The content is produced by leading psychologists, health care professionals and mentors. We partner with the NHS in North and Central London as their recommended mental fitness app for NHS surgical patients on their waiting list. We aim to develop Mentor360 to help teenagers and young adults through the Education space.

LUX: How has your personal journey influenced what you want for the next generation?
SK: I want young people to be healthy, happy, pursuing their passion, growing up as global citizens. The pandemic reminds us of the value of family and the importance of giving children a happy childhood.

Find out more:
shanyankoder.com
hua-gallery.com

‘Atelier’ (2014). Thomas Demand.

German photographer Thomas Demand has become celebrated for his compelling, sometimes shocking, abstract recreations of the everyday. He talks to Anna Wallace-Thompson about the homogenization of our worlds, finding power in the banal, and Saddam Hussein’s kitchen.

Thomas Demand

There’s a particular moment of calm – let’s call it suspended time – when things have settled down while still retaining the memory of the movement that filled them a split second before. Think of the moment when that last dust mote finally settled after drifting down a shaft of light, or the ghostly echoes of the last flutter of a piece of paper as it relaxes into place. Or when you don’t know if the door just slammed shut or is about to burst open. Or sensing the presence of people only through their absence. That’s the moment German photographer Thomas Demand is interested in.

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In fact, at first glance, Demand’s photographs appear simply to be snaps of ordinary places, unremarkable for their sameness, from half-empty supermarket shelves to a bath awaiting its occupant. (This is something that struck him about modern urban spaces, particularly when he first arrived in the US.) Yet, these seemingly humble snaps of everyday situations have earned him a place in the collections of international institutions such as the Guggenheim and MoMA. At auction, his works have sold for more than $100,000 at Christie’s, and he was included in the sale of Mario Testino’s personal collection at Sotheby’s, alongside luminaries such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman.

‘Hanami’ (2014). Thomas Demand

So what is it about these seemingly everyday snaps that has everybody so hooked? Well, further examination reveals each portrait to be a meticulously built paper recreation. Yes, paper. Working in often quite large dimensions, Demand reconstructs the most complex real- life scenarios out of the humblest of materials. They are perfect – or rather, perfectly imperfect, for at the heart of Demand’s work is an interest in the world as a filtered rendering – that is, the paradox of examining past moments through the lens of the present – and even then, through a canny reconstruction of that original moment. “Perfection and beauty are very often seen as interchangeable,” says Demand. “However, if something is too perfect, then it becomes sterile.” And so, working from found photographs of banal scenes (be they supermarket aisles, hotel rooms or office interiors), Demand meticulously reconstructs these tableaux out of paper – warts and all. It is these sculptural paper sets – often quite large in scale – that he then photographs, imbuing the finished image with such an uncanny realism that the eye is often fooled into believing it is looking at the ‘real deal’.

‘Folders’ (2017)

“What I have been doing over the years is replacing the time frame of the [original] photograph with another time frame, which is no less a point in time,” explains Demand when we speak. “The original scenario in the media photograph may no longer be there to look at – although it may be from an event that is still in our short or long-term memory, depending on when it was taken. What I suppose you can see in my work is a paradox of time standing still that is both my own fragile paper construction (complete with all the little imperfections and details of ‘reality’) as much as it is a memory of the moment captured in the original photograph.” The sense of transience in Demand’s work is further compounded by the fact that he often discards the sculpture itself (and, in fact, originally began photographing them purely for the purposes of documentation).

‘Rainbow’ (2018)

In person, Demand is more tidy professor than wild-child artist, his neatly trimmed hair and beard perfectly in sync with his nifty vest and jacket. Get him talking, however, and you can almost hear the thoughts galloping inside his head. When he gets going, he talks a mile a minute, as if the thoughts inside him were moving faster than his ability to articulate them. They tumble out almost in a stream of consciousness, except just when you think he might be going off on a tangent, like a master conductor, Demand deftly brings all the threads together, eloquently and precisely articulating his point.His powers of observation, too, are key to the vision behind the work. Growing up in Munich in the 1960s and 70s, it was when Demand visited the GDR that he first began to pay attention to the power of mass production (or, in the case of the GDR, the lack thereof), and Warhol’s Brillo boxes, for example, remain a key influence: “I grew up in Munich, which is in West Germany, which had plenty of everything.”

Read more: Why we love the New Perlée creations by Van Cleef & Arpels 

As a young artist, travels and study followed – Düsseldorf, Paris, and Goldsmiths in London – as well as the US (he is now based in both LA and Berlin). During this time he began to notice what he refers to as global “homogenization” – a hospital ward in one part of the world looks very much like it does anywhere else, for example, and, with our mass-produced products – be they Nike trainers or even the Tupperware found in Saddam Hussein’s kitchen – we are more united than we think. “When they found Saddam, and showed the photographs, there were so many remarkably recognisable objects,” says Demand. “In one way, it’s the devil’s lair, but in another, it’s possible to see it in parts as your own kitchen. Maybe it’s a little dirtier, but he had the same objects as you and me.” The resulting work – Küche/Kitchen (2004) – could truly be a picture of a kitchen anywhere. “It’s funny how far objects circulate worldwide: you look at photographs of upheavals in Africa and people are wearing the T-shirts of a local bank in Texas, or plastic sandals made in China and marketed in California can end up in Ethiopia. I am fascinated by how the everyday links us to other cultures, from the pervasive blue computer screens that illuminate of office buildings out of hours, or the industrial slickness of an airport.”

‘Küche/ Kitchen’ (2004)

‘Daily #16’ (2011)

As well as the tableaux of media images that he is known for, Demand has experimented with more intimate scenes familiar to social media. The ongoing ‘Dailies’ series begun in 2008 features an ashtray, a plastic cup shoved into a chain link fence, or even a leaf about to fall through a sewer grate. “I was looking at doing something shorter and easier,” he says. “We all have cell phones in our pockets, and the images being circulated are now private photos – subjective little notes that might not make the news, but are still a form of communication and a culture in itself.”

Read more: In conversation with Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson

These ‘smaller’ works also offer a welcome break from larger and more ambitious set- ups. “In a good year I can make five works, but in a bad one just one,” sighs Demand. “Also, working occasionally with a team of 30 people means that if you’re two months into a particular set up, it’s too late to stop, so you keep going until it works, there’s no way around it.” For example, the work Lichtung/ Clearing Demand created for the 2003 edition of the Venice Biennale took months to get just right due to it being displayed en plein air, and therefore needed to be in some harmony with its verdant surroundings, the challenge being that the Venetian foliage kept changing with the seasons while the image was being built.

‘Daily #15’ (2011)

They leave things open – can you imagine how they might they be reused for something else?” This is particularly evident in pieces such as Rainbow (2018), part of ‘Model Studies’, in which abstract circular shapes in a range of yellows, oranges and reds hint at the full potential of the building they might perhaps one day have been, yet also present themselves as abstract colourscapes.

Most recently, Demand has had a major monograph published. The Complete Papers presents a survey of his work over three decades, and proved to be both a challenge as well as something of an eye opener, as he was able to see an evolution in his work that he had never noticed before. “I thought I was pretty organised, but it turns out there were so many pieces I’d forgotten about – and now that the book is out, there are so many more pieces I realise I would still need to add,” he laughs. “I can see that my work, since the beginning, has been moving slowly towards abstraction, though photography and abstraction can be a bit of a bad marriage in that photography, by its very nature, is figurative.” So what’s the endgame? “If my work were to become too abstract then it would all become a pointless exercise. To be something, the image has to stay on the very edge of nearly becoming something.”

Find out more: thomasdemand.info

This article was originally published in the Summer 19 Issue.