At first, the images Thomas Demand creates seem to depict the real world. A closer look, however, reveals that they are actually photographs of temporary sculptural re-creations.

Demand often selects his source imagery from the news media, and he re-creates those images as life-size models using colored paper and cardboard. Then he photographs the images and prints them at a monumental scale.

Afterward, Demand destroys his models, leaving behind only their ghostly photographic doubles. The “stutter of history” evoked by the exhibition’s title lies in that strange gap between the real world and the re-created world of paper and cardboard that the artist conjures in his studio.

The internationally touring exhibition Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History is a landmark retrospective of the artist’s work, and the MFAH is the only U.S. venue.

Born in Germany in 1964, Demand depicts places loaded with historical meaning: the abandoned control room of the Fukushima plant following the 2011 nuclear disaster; the site of the Florida recount of the 2000 American presidential election; the ransacked offices of the East German secret police after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Ultimately, Demand’s works are as much about the circulation of images and the politics of memory as they are about the specific moments depicted.