Portrait by Dominic Dupont

In July Thomas Demand’s studio – set in a vast warehouse in the Mitte district of Berlin – was home to a 3m-tall replica of a church organ made from coloured paper. When I visited, the finishing touches were being made by the artist and his team of assistants, perfecting the thousands of pipes, pedals and meticulously recreated keys; a camera stand was positioned directly opposite, ready to capture the end result. Its construction had taken three months. Within the next week, however, this intricate model would be photographed, dismantled, destroyed and stuffed into a recycling bin. This is the brief lifespan of each of the German artist’s sculptures, which are created only to serve his final, large-scale photographs. ‘You have to destroy them straight away, otherwise you grow to like them,’ he says.

This new work is part of Demand’s exhibition at Germany’s national gallery in Berlin, which opened on 18 September. It is the 45-year-old artist’s most significant retrospective to date and, in a characteristic mix of grandiosity and understatement, he has named it after the institution itself, Nationalgalerie. Each artwork selected for the show – including 32 works from the last 20 years together with six new pieces – addresses an event or subject matter that has shaped German history over the last century. Demand likens the curatorial procedure to a Google search through his works: ‘you type in ‘German’ and ‘national’ and ‘gallery’ and you get a whole load of results: some completely outside of what you’d expect’.

New work by Demand, Parliament, which depicts a part of Germany’s old parliament building in Bonn

In conversation, Demand talks softly, quickly and precisely. Like his artworks, an acute awareness of absurdity underlies almost every statement, but the wit is resolutely deadpan. The grandeur of having a retrospective at the Nationalgalerie, a building designed byMies van der Rohe, is something that Demand appears to treat with amused detachment. ‘If you have a theme like that, it’s impossible to fulfil the expectations,’ he says. ‘But the way that you fail is interesting. It’s such a pompous brief and obviously my work can’t fulfil that.’

For someone who, in his own words, has ‘never been much concerned with where I came from’ the show is a surprising exploration of German identity, through Demand’s heavily mediated work. Although the selection process relied greatly upon serendipity, it has still resulted in the inclusion of many key works that cemented Demand’s reputation as a distinctive artist. This includes Office, from 1995, which depicts the Stasi Central office in Berlin after it was ransacked by East Berliners seeking their personal records, and Room, from the same year, which shows the military conference room that was blown up in Count von Stauffenberg’s attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944.

Room, 1994, is Demand’s simulation of the bunker where the last failed attempt was made on Hitler's life

A centrepiece, though, will be the photograph of Demand’s replica church organ. Like all the other new works in the show, it was a project that the artist had planned before but had not yet realised: the theme of nationhood provided a perfect opportunity. It was inspired by a free-standing, open-air church organ – the largest of its kind in the world – built by FirstWorldWar veterans and situated in the small valley town of Kuftsein, on the Austrian-German border. At 12pm, every day since 1931, the same tune has been played on the organ – The Song of the Old Comrade – as a tribute to lost soldiers. The melody reverberated around the valley and could, apparently, be heard up to 10km away. The tradition continued uninterrupted until last November when, according to Demand, the organ was taken down to be rebuilt with digital workings. In a city such as Berlin, where memorials to the past are ubiquitous – from Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust monument to small plaques marking the spot where individuals were killed attempting to cross theWall – Demand describes the war veterans’ organ as ‘a beautiful, simple straightforward idea of making a memorial, rather than having a field of stones or a symbolic figure.’ Demand’s own version of the organ is therefore a memorial to a memorial that is losing much of its resonance due to the requirements of tourism. Yet Demand is aware that his work also falls almost comically short of the original: ‘if you make a picture of the instrument you completely miss its point, because the instrument is about the sound.’

Office,1995, depicts the Stasi Central Office after it had been ransacked by east Berliners

Demand is not a Berliner, though his presence in the city is testament to what a comfortable environment Berlin has become for artists in the last 20 years; he used to share his workspace with Olafur Eliasson and Tacita Dean, who now have studios in other parts of Berlin. Demand himself was born inMunich, and gained his artistic education at Dusseldorf’s Kunstakademie, the Cité des Arts in Paris and, most importantly, Goldsmiths College in London. It was there that Demand hit upon the technique of photographing precise paper reconstructions of scenes and objects. Frequently working from photographs in the popular media, the scenes tend to have a narrative or significance beyond his deliberately imperfect replicas: previous works have depicted the kitchen area of Saddam Hussein’s hideout in Iraq, and the studio of an artist who was assaulted by Baader-Meinhof members. Detail is lost in the translation, and Demand’s paper constructions bring a sheen and lightness that is only subtly unreal. It is a technique that simultaneously draws the viewer in, and distances them from the underlying story.

From Demand’s Klause series, 2006, which depicts the scene of a crime in a German village

Much has been written about the complex layers of meaning in Demand’s art, but the humour is often missed, perhaps because he is often attracted to sinister subjects – one famous piece depicted the hallway leading to serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment – but also because jokes are not usually expected from a German artist whose work seems to imply an obsessive eye for detail. Yet it is, Demand says, ‘an underrated quality in the work’, which is almost always present. A new piece for the Nationalgalerie exhibition recreates a bus shelter where German pop group Tokio Hotel, according to Demand, used to sit as ten-year-olds, ‘dreaming of becoming the world’s biggest band’. Last year they won an MTV award for best newcomer and, meanwhile, their old bus shelter hang-out has been dismantled into tiny fragments and sold on Ebay. ‘It’s now a pixelated structure, but with the pixels spread out across the world,’ says Demand with some wonderment, before adding: ‘they’re really a terrible band.’ Another new work is a reconstruction of one of Demand’s children’s bedrooms, which displays the light-hearted side even more obviously. ‘There’s a toy in there, and every time I see it, I laugh because it’s just such a very funny object to make,’ he says.

Architecture is one of the artist’s abiding concerns, and architects have been among his most consistent fans. Rem Koolhaas will be taking part in the series of talks that accompany the forthcoming retrospective and, at the end of last year, an architecture unit from Kingston University, led by new head of faculty Daniel Rosbottom, staged an exhibition entitled Demanding Attention, which emulated the German artist’s work. ‘I think it is very difficult, for young architects in particular, to think about the character of place, and this is something my work addresses,’ says Demand.

Studio, 1997, derives from a photograph of the 1970's television set for the German version of What's My Line?

One of his long-term collaborators is British architect Caruso St John, who designed his 2004 exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, and has also contributed to the design of the new Nationalgalerie show. ‘Thomas is incredibly engaged in architecture,’ says Adam Caruso, who finds that his own practice’s work is influenced by Demand’s artistic methods. The exhibition design itself grew out of Demand’s typically meticulous background research, compiling information on almost all of the past shows that had been held at the Nationalgalerie, and was also particularly influenced byMies van der Rohe’s Velvet and Silk Cafe exhibition design from 1927, using heavy curtains to divide the space, block out light and, says Demand, ‘to avoid any pretension of permanence.’

A hint that Caruso St John shares Demand’s taste for combining social commentary with dry humour can be found in their joint, competition-winning proposal for the Escher-Wyss Platz in Zurich: it was said that the design of the scheme’s central building was simultaneously inspired by the famously defiant Nail House in Chongqing, China, and the house beneath a Coney Island rollercoaster that featured inWoody Allen’s Annie Hall. Demand’s fascination with the meaning and representation of architecture is also evident in a new work for the Nationalgalerie retrospective, entitled Parliament. It depicts a small section of the debating chamber of Germany’s old centre of national governance in Bonn, with its imposing, dark black-and-gold interior colour scheme. Implicit in Demand’s replication is a critique of Norman Foster’s Reichstag building: ‘it’s so transparent you can photograph it from anywhere, so you don’t have this iconic view anymore…there’s nothing specific about that space,’ he says.

Thomas Demand outside his studio in the Mitte district of Berlin. He used to share the space with Olafur Eliasson and Tacita Dean

Though, as in all of his work, Demand is bringing layers of doubt and irony to this retrospective, this will inevitably be a more personal show than he has embarked on before. Each of the talks, which accompany the show throughout its run, will feature a ‘double-act’ of commentators from outside the art world, and will be mediated by the gallery’s director and Demand himself. He says: ‘we will be standing there, quite vulnerably, discussing whatever we want to discuss.’ It is an unusually brave way for an artist to engage with their audience. Although one suspects that Demand will be equally satisfied even if they aren’t a total success.