Thomas Demand Melonen, 2025

Melonen depicts a row of large containers parked inside a plainly lit, apparently public hallway. The police-blue containers are filled to the top with perfectly even, oval objects uniformly colored in a sage green hue, interrupted by sharp, moss green stripes. These objects’ feigned nature is hidden in plain sight: they are cheap proxies for organic watermelons.

Thomas Demand’s work usually relies on found images that he painstakingly reconstructs in three-dimensional, live-size models before photographing them; Melonen is no exception to this procedure. The work is based on a photo published after the finding of a large amount of methamphetamine inside a truck ostensibly loaded with watermelons, at the US-Mexican border. As the artist explains, “I stumbled upon a picture of fake fruits used to smuggle drugs. That source image exemplifies the concept of a fake used as evidence in a public photograph. I imagined artistically untrained workers trying to make truckloads of these handmade melonesque balls.”