Goodbye Brother, 2001
Synthetic polymer paint on canvas
183 x 123 cm

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

  • Selected exhibition history
  • Permanent collections
  • Projects
  • Editions
  • Publications
  • Recent news

2011GROUP Nod Nod Wink Wink: Conceptual Art in New Mexico and Its Influences, Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, USA

GROUP Roundabout, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel

2010GROUP La Corbusier Installation, Venice Biennale of Architecture, Italy

GROUP Roundabout, City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand

GROUP Robot Dreams, Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland

2009SOLO Tom Sachs: Cameras, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, USA

2008GROUP The Lines of the Hand (Las Lineas De La Mano), University Museum of Contemporary Art of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Coyoacan, Mexico

2007SOLO Space Program, Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, USA

SOLO Tom Sachs: Logjam, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, USA

2006SOLO Tom Sachs, Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy

Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, USA

Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo, Norway

Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France

Ellipse Foundation, Contemporary Art Collection Arte Centre, Cascais, Portugal

The Jewish Museum, New York, USA

Lever House Collection, New York, USA

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA

The Sammlung Essl Collection, Vienna, Austria

The Sammlung Olbricht Collection, Essen, Germany

The Sammlung Goetz Collection, Munich, Germany

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA

University of North Carolina, Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Greensboro, USA

Vanhaerents Collection, Brussels, Belgium

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, USA