artist profile
Tom Sachs
born
1966
lives and works
New York City, USA
education
BA, Bennington College, Bennington, USA, 1989
about the artist
A self-professed practitioner of “bricolage” (the act of building/composing using a diverse range of things), Tom Sachs has engineered a sprawling collection of objects, paintings, and drawings that spoof innovations in technology, icons of consumerism, and, by extension, the weight of progress and forces of capitalism. Deconstructing painted imagery or readymade products, he reassembles, reassigns, and ultimately asserts ownership over them. Though generally exuding a playful demeanor, the artist is notorious for imposing a stern work ethic onto production in the studio, so that he might continue to turn out his “cultural prosthetics,” which are, in truth, decidedly serious and urgent reports on the loss of culture in contemporary America and much of the Western world. Trained academically and professionally as an architect, Sachs has received tremendous recognition ever since foraying into the world of art, and has held monumental one-man surveys at the Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst in Oslo, Norway, and at the Fondazione Prada in Milan, Italy. Logjam, an exhibition that focused on not his art, but his domestic and professional settings, traveled from the Des Moines Art Center to the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, USA. Other solo shows of his work have been held at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, USA; the Bohen Foundation in New York, USA; and the Guggenheim Deutsche in Berlin, Germany. His work was also included in Roundabout at the City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel.
Website: http://www.tomsachs.org