MILAN.- Prada presents images created by Thomas Demand for the new window displays for its stores across the world, a radically beautiful and colourful sequence of blossoming cherry trees that celebrates the arrival of spring.

Hanami – which means ‘flower viewing’ – is the centuries-old Japanese art of enjoying the beauty of flowers. The cherry blossom season, a highpoint in the year, marks the end of winter and represents the youth, zest for life and emotion embodied by spring, a truly universal image and a powerful symbol of energy.

Spread seamlessly across the shop’s windows, Demand’s floral images, entitled Blossom, give rise to a vibrant narrative which, inserted into the real world, creates a new dialogue with passers-by in cities around the world.

This work fits perfectly into the German artist’s oeuvre, which has the concept of photography as a global language at its heart. In this series, Demand once again rebuilds existing images and replaces them with an artificial version of themselves. In his collaboration with Prada, his work encounters and enters into a fruitful exchange with the world of fashion.

The installations, with a curved or box-shaped illuminated backdrop, are rounded off by steel display stands with a matte pink Perspex surface, or illuminated cylinders with the same floral pattern as the scenery.

The display can be admired at Prada’s stores in New York, Milan, Paris, London, Tokyo, Singapore, Seoul, Los Angeles and other selected cities from February.

Born in 1964 in Munich, Thomas Demand is a German artist known for his large-scale photographs, depicting motives from mass-media images or from his personal archive reconstructed in life size from paper and cardboard. Through his work, he strives to overturn the notion of photography as an inevitably objective or truthful medium, exploring the gap between reality and its representation. Many of his works impart an architectural understanding of spaces, and his interest in architecture and models let to various collaborations with architects such as Caruso St. John, David Chipperfield, Rem Koolhaas and SANAA.

Demand showed his work at major museums and galleries worldwide, including the Fondazione Prada, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Guggenheim Museum, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Tate Modern, London.