Stairs, ladders and lifts are the motifs of Thomas Demand's latest monograph, L'Esprit d'Escalier, which is published on the occasion of his show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. The title actually refers to so-called "staircase wit," that concise French expression for the chagrin of missed retorts--those hapless comebacks one only ever thinks up belatedly (i.e. when already descending the stairs): "I should've said (fill in blank)!" etc. One of Demand's ironic allusions to his title is a new work titled "Landing," which shows the shards of broken Qing vases on a staircase--a mishap caused by a visitor to The Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge in January 2006, who stumbled on his shoelaces and crashed into the three eighteenth-century vases, smashing them to pieces. As ever, Demand combines conceptual rigor and exacting craft in his painstakingly re-created sets, with their eerie edge of artifice. L'Esprit d'Escalier presents an overview of his current work in 23 large photographs, plus a film project and an architectural installation specially prepared for his Irish Museum exhibition. Alongside an excerpt from David Foster Wallace's Girl with Curious Hair, it also includes commissioned writings by Dave Eggers, Paul Oliver, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Leith, Rachael Thomas and Enrique Juncosa.

Originally trained as a sculptor, Thomas Demand approaches photography as a means of preserving ephemeral paper constructions but inevitably the camera becomes central to his creative process. At first glance, Demand's works seem to present fragments of a hyperreal and familiar place but, before long, they reveal their true identity: a wholly artificial world reduced to generic forms. Large immaculate photographs of interiors and architectural exteriorsa world peopled with inanimate objects and bathed in uniform lightingare mounted on Plexiglas, which underscores the materiality of the photographic object. For each of his reproductions, Demand constructs life-size models using paper and cardboard, and these forms always allow signs of their true nature to show through. 50 color illustrations.

Thomas Demand is one of the most celebrated contemporary photo artists. At first sight, Demands pictures, say of a kitchen, an elevator, or a car park, seem like depictions of everyday places. Yet on closer inspection they turn out to be reconstructions of reality: Demand creates life-size environments made of paper and cardboard and accurate down to the smallest details, photographs these re-creations and then destroys them. The pictures that arise in this way put their finger squarely on the drab aesthetics of the modern office world and architecture. Demands sculptural and somehow filmic simulations, completely devoid of people, lead us into a world of models, in which a faked reality blends with the memory of a real reality to generate vividly cool images and to investigate the concept of virtual reality that plays such a key role in our technological multimedia age.

Volume number 10 in the Conversation Series with the influential museum director, curator, writer and conversationalist Hans Ulrich Obrist, is given over to an intensive talk with the important German conceptual artist, Thomas Demand, who constructs precise environments out of paper maquettes, which are then photographed to haunting effect. Topics include concepts and rules of operation, the reconstruction and reverberation of history, work processes, studio realities and significant exhibitions of recent years. This wide-ranging conversation, modestly illustrated with black-and-white images, is as intelligent as it is revealing, giving the reader an unprecedented glimpse into the minds of two of the most brilliant players on the international art scene. Demand lives between Berlin and New York, where a retrospective of his work was shown at The Museum of Modern Art in 2005. Hans Ulrich Obrist is the Co-Director of the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, as well as the Serpentine Gallery, London, where he lives and works.

Thomas Demands work lures the viewer into a reality that is not what it appears to be. His images present scenes of political and social events, which the artist recreates out of paper and cardboard, in a scale that is true to the original size of the setting. Demand then photographs these sculptures, creating images in which specific traces of the events and the protagonists are removed, leaving possible evidence of a crime scene, one which appears familiar but yet out of reach. The exhibition and book Nationalgalerie brings together Demands work of the last 15 years which is rooted in German imagery. Demand examines the Deutschlandbild, the German image in photographs from a variety of scenarios in the post-war period. From a selection both known and new of key images of decisive political events and private moments Demand offers a kaleidoscopic vision of a society.

For this exhibition, Demand presents photographs of two large installations - Processo Grottesco and Yellowcake. The volumes contain a critical text by Germano Celant, iconographical documentation including postcards, works of art, drawings and photographs dedicated to the grotto theme, essays by Robert Storr and Alex Farquharson, and an article by the journalist Carlo Bonini.