Selected Exhibitions

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Sachs continues his formal investigation and exploration of the modernist canon. Guided by the iconoclastic spirit and wit of Marcel Duchamp’s iconic “readymades,” Sachs employs his signature bricolage technique to reimagine sculptures by Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuși. Drawing on an interplay between technical production and quotidian materials, these sculptures question traditional conceptions of what constitutes a work of art.

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For this recent series of works, Tom Sachs immersed himself in paintings by Pablo Picasso, particularly those produced during his so-called ‘War Years’, between 1937 and 1945, which he reimagines using his own distinctive painterly language. This exhibition is conceived as a continuation of the show held at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais at the beginning of this year. For this second volume, however, Sachs has focused particularly on Picasso’s portraits: his reinterpretations of which form an interrogation of consumption and desire in portraiture, and a wry reflection on the purpose of painting itself.

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Tom Sachs: Drawings and Sound Systems presents a program of the artist’s iconic sculptures, specifically drawings and sound systems, to craft a taxonomy of commodified objects and the systems that build them.

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For this exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais, Tom Sachs has immersed himself in paintings Pablo Picasso produced during his so-called ‘War Years,’ between 1937 and 1945. Reimagining Picasso’s work using his own distinctive painterly language, Sachs also challenges Picasso by contrasting him with two opponents: longstanding rival Marcel Duchamp and a more contemporary adversary, Lisa Simpson. This exhibition brings Sachs’s reinterpretations of Picasso, Duchamp and Simpson’s works into conversation to create a wry reflection on the purpose of painting.

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Tom Sachs: Chawan presents new ceramics and sculptures at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo. Sachs has immersed himself in the practice and study of ceramics, including daily ceramics practice and a two-year course of intensive ceramics study with master JJ PEET in 2012. Since then, hand-forming chawans has been part of his daily ritual. He learned to use various ceramic types, including porcelain and stoneware, and multiple firing techniques.

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Building upon the sculptural exploration of what constitutes a spaceship, Sachs continues to challenge the accepted understandings of the vessels that carry us between dimensions. For Sachs, a spaceship can transport us physically, metaphysically, and spiritually. Any object that allows for this transformation is a spaceship. New paintings see the artist revisit his drawings and studies of everyday objects, an exercise in both time travel and rebirth.

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Sachs investigates the accepted understandings, assumptions, epistemology, and consensus of what constitutes a spaceship. By tracing its evolving historical and linguistic understanding, the artist explores a spaceship’s physical, metaphysical, and spiritual possibilities. Sachs offers the formal criteria defining a spaceship as an object that has the ability to move us from one state to another.

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Tom Sachs: Furniture is an extension of Sachs’ sculpture practice, he has been designing and building furniture for 30 years. This is the artist’s first gallery exhibition of his furniture in the United States in over twenty years. Sachs’ furniture is conspicuously handmade and shows evidence of each piece’s construction, removing it from the realm of miraculous conception that pervades industry. This transparency—the idea of showing marks—tells the story of the making. The more we can tell the story, the more we can invest in our things and build greater connections with the items and rituals in our daily lives. Sachs challenges us to reflect on the objects we buy; the furniture we have, our sound systems and the music they play, and reminds us everything is art – it’s about the rituals that activate it.

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Tom Sachs: Rocket Factory Paintings continues the artist’s three decades long career, producing handmade recreations of cultural icons by reimagining the artist's own work, and transforming pixels into paintings. These paintings represent the golden intersection of three brands and a provocative title. Guided by the materiality of paint, thick impasto brushstrokes crash like waves against hard-edge clean borders – these are paintings that all follow the same structure, yet are each different. Sachs employs the techniques of traditional oil painting, championed by Abstract Expressionism, refined by the modern advances of synthetic polymer. While challenging our understanding of art, Sachs continuously prioritizes the viscerally handmade object by pulling the metaverse back into the meatspace.

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SPACE PROGRAM: Indoctrination is not a survey. It is an Indoctrination Center presenting the values of the studio; the curtain has been pulled back to show visitors not only how each work is made, but the philosophy behind the making. The sculptures in Gallery 1 include a bricolage version of the Apollo Program’s Saturn V Moon Rocket, and an array of Special Effects sculptures activated during each mission, each now displayed as totemic tributes to Sachs’ historical journeys to other worlds.

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The exhibition at HYBE INSIGHT features thirteen sound systems that highlight the artist’s ability to distinctly transform ordinary, everyday materials into intricate works of art. With wit and ingenuity, Sachs creates boomboxes that play music and activate the space, turning it into an immersive soundscape. Transparency is key in the artist’s practice; the boomboxes on display combine perfected handmade sculptures and found objects with the materials most sacred to the artist’s studio, but never omit pencil traces or revisions left on their face.

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The new paintings and sculptures on view at Vito Schnabel Gallery find Sachs in the throes of his ongoing love affair with Switzerland; not merely a place of exquisite natural beauty, but a concept– a fantasy that frustrates attempts to pierce its illusions, a global brand that obscures the desires and efforts driving it. References to the Alpine nation began appearing in Sachs’ art in the early 1990s. Three-decades later, his “Swiss obsession” has matured into full-blown Helvetiaphilia .

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With this body of work, Sachs recalls a heavy memory of DIY punk-rock ethos in a moment of specific time, returning to his iconography of sacred objects in a sweet sliver of gap between vinyl records and cd ascendence.

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The Deichtorhallen Hamburg hosts Tom Sachs and his team of sculptor-astronauts as they prepare to advance space exploration on their next interstellar mission, SPACE PROGRAM: RARE EARTHS. The fourth exhibition in Sachs’s Space Program series continues the thirteen-year exploration of the boundaries of other worlds and human possibilities.

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A solo exhibition held at Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, France, which will travel to the gallery's London space at Ely House, featuring new handmade sculptures of everyday objects lovingly cobbled together in the artist’s signature bricolage aesthetic.

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Tom Sachs: Work, is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Florida. The exhibition emphasizes Sachs' desire to revisit long-held themes and ideas over decades, revising and expanding upon them. He refers to these processes as “multicycles,” a term coined by gallerist Mario Diacono, while the ritual of “work”—both a core element for Sachs as well as a recurring theme in his exhibitions—is itself a multicycle.

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Over the years, Sachs has become known for his larger-than-life sculptures and immersive installations, but paintings have been a central focus of his practice since the mid-1990s. Tom Sachs: Handmade Paintings represents the first exhibition to focus exclusively on Sachs’ work in the medium, and the show marks the artist’s first with the gallery.

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Tom Sachs' first solo exhibition in Germany in fifteen years includes work such as Tea Ceremony, a distinctive reworking of the chanoyu, or traditional Japanese tea ceremony, as well as a large format sculpture made specifically for the museum that depicts the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center before September 11, 2001.

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From the moment Sachs began developing a culture of tea in 2012, he aimed to exhibit his Tea Ceremony in Japan. At Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, this completely immersive and interactive environment will a last be seen in the country that inspired it. Sachs has produced a complete, alternative material culture, from bowls and ladles, scroll paintings, vases, and bronzes, to a motorized tea whisk, a shot clock, and an electronic brazier.

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Tomio Koyama Gallery is pleased to present Smutshow, a solo exhibition of works by Tom Sachs. This show is organized in correspondence to the exhibition, Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony, held at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (Hatsudai, Shinjuku) from April 20 to June 23, 2019. Along with the related exhibitions Tom Sachs: Indoctrination Center at KOMAGOME 1-14 cas (Komagome, April 20 – May 14, 2019) and Tom Sachs: Pop-up Store at Beams Harajuku (Harajuku, April 19 – May 6, 2019), this constitutes part of a large-scale presentation of Sachs’ works in four locations across Tokyo.

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Switzerland began to appear as a reference in Tom Sachs' art in the early 1990s. In what he today refers to as a "Surrealist-punk gesture" and "act of vandalism," the young artist deposited a pile of vinyl stickers emblazoned with the provocative phrase "Nuke the Swiss" in the reception desk of Deitch Projects New York in the spring of 1996. Sachs' free art found its dark humor in the suggestion that anyone would willfully bomb the place and the people in possession of the world's wealth.

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For Sachs, Switzerland is a nation of boundaries: geographically it sits in an imposing mountainous landscape; economically it acts as a shelter for extreme wealth; and politically it holds a status as an EU non-member state and was a safe haven during times of war or persecution. Swiss citizenship is “the ultimate status nationality, representing wealth, neutrality and freedom”; a status Tom Sachs wishes to make available to all.

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Known for his dry wit, this modern day chawan'ya observes, "There comes a time in every middle-aged man's life when he realizes that Japan is where it's at... Mourning the loss of spirituality in our capitalist environment, we admire tea's integration of humility, prosperity, and spirituality." For Sachs, that has meant making chawan, or tea bowls, in addition to leaning chanoyu, the way of tea. In this exhibition, Sachs has filled several tea cabinets with chawan and highlighted a number of "heroes," individual chawan that he sets apart as embodying a certain heightened "thingness."

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Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony presents Sachs' distinctive reworking of a traditional Japanese tea ceremony; including the myriad elements of that ritualistic universe. In the Nasher's indoor gallery, Sachs set a tea house in a garden accessorized with variations on lanterns, gates, a wash basin, a plywood airplane lavatory, a koi pond, an ultra HD video wall, a bronze bonsai made of over 3,600 individually welded parts, and other objects, all made from commonplace materials.

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Tom Sachs' fourth solo show at Sperone Westwater showcases the artist's radical expansion of the category of sculpture and his restless curiosity about our "culture of making." The exhibition extends the tradition of the wunderkammer, cabinets of curiosities which arose in sixteenth-century Europe as repositories for wondrous and exotic objects. In Sachs' wunderkammer, the artist-collector incorporates the objects of his fascination, assigning them a pseudo-scientific and a pseudo-spiritual function.

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An exhibition of new and old bronzes.

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Encompassing nearly two decades of works by the internationally renowned artist. Comprising the first-ever survey exhibition of his paintings, "Radiant City" brings together more than 25 works that showcase the central themes of his art: consumerism, space exploration and cultural progress.

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A show of sculpture in the lobby of Sogetsu Kaikan, presented by Tomio Koyama Gallery.

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Tom Sachs and his team of astronauts set their sights on the next frontier of space exploration in Space Program: Europa.

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The works in Nuggets span the spectrum of Tom’s artistic, cultural and sociological interests, from Brancusi to McDonald’s. Among the resonant works are his Kelly Bag in plywood, canvas, steel, resin, latex and nylon and his plywood, latex, and epoxy milk crate, with steel hardware, his homage to a masterpiece of modern design. There is also Nutritional Facts, a giant wood burned chart of the nutritional content of the full McDonald’s menu. The works are presented on pedestals like rare tribal sculpture in the Metropolitan’s Michael Rockefeller Wing.

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Tom Sachs Boombox Retrospective features functional boomboxes made between 1999 and 2016 at The Brooklyn Museum. The boomboxes will be queued to play 60 minute playlists created by the artist, friends and fans throughout the entirety of the show. There is also a bodega which will be selling everything from cat food, to editioned works by the artist and visiting guests.

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This major exhibition is the first at the Museum to present work by a single artist other than Noguchi. The exhibition centers on an immersive environment representing Sachs’ distinctive reworking of chanoyu, or traditional Japanese tea ceremony—including the myriad elements essential to that intensely ritualistic universe.

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A selection of Nuggets.

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Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective features functional boomboxes made between 1999 and 2015 at the Contemporary Austin's Jones Center location, as well as other sculptures at their Laguna Gloria location. The Boomboxes will be queued to play 60 minute playlists created by the artist, friends, and fans throughout the entirety of the show.

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Cabinets filled with ceramic Japanese tea bowls (or Chawan) made between 2012 - 2014 show the fingerprints and process of making these handmade objects.

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Satan Ceramics is a group show featuring Mary Frey, Pat McCarthy, JJ PEET and Tom Sachs, The four friends ritualistically make ceramics together every week. This show is a culmination of their four different styles that show under the guidance of their leader, JJ PEET.

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An exhibition featuring mainly wall works which highlight two distinct techniques in Tom Sachs’s practice: pyrography and marquetry. By using fire as the sole drawing tool, pyrography permits to create a work without any additional material, while the craft of marquetry is a complex assembly of pre-painted, inlaid elements.

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Voodoo continues where "WORK", 2011 left off. This effort will continue.

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The mission continues. A collection of complex systems, codes, and rituals on a voyage to the fourth planet, Mars.

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"I thank the Lord I'm allowed to work every day."

- James Brown

"The reward for good work is more work."

- Tom Sachs

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A collection of Sachs' drawings from the past decade, including eleven new works from the past year.

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For the 2010 Venice Biennale of Architecture, Sachs celebrates Le Corbusier's visionary but crippling legacy.

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Examining years of obsession with cameras from 1974 to 2009, CAMERAS is the first exhibition exploring Sachs' fascination with these modern objects.

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Large scale bronzes of foamcore Hello Kitty, My Melody, and Miffy models debut at Lever House in New York City. Other bronzes in the collection include skateboarding ramps and stacks of car batteries.

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GOLD & PLYWOOD is a collection of pyrographic works on painted and gilt plywood. Images are inspired by 19th century woodcuts in Goethe's "Reineke Fuchs". Shown in conjunction with the BRONZE COLLECTION at the Trocadero.

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ANIMALS consists of ten small rooms, each containing individual works. Whether literally depicted, or figuratively alluded to, animals dominate the 25 freestanding and wall-mounted paintings and sculptures, exploring the presence of the "animalistic" in our everyday lives.

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SPACE PROGRAM: A complete trip to the moon and back. Elaborate systems and processes yielded a large body of work as well as a compelling demonstration at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, CA.

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LOGJAM details the working and living environments of the Tom Sachs world. Included are workstations, toolboxes, and other items that reveal the ubiquity of bricolage in Tom's life, and showcase the process that has driven his work as an artist.

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Lists, pesticides, air conditioners - these are all items we use to manipulate and comprehend the world we live in. ISLANDIA is a collection of such objects that pervade modern life and culture.

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The Fondazione Prada holds a retrospective of Tom's work, including new large works made specifically on the occasion of the exhibition. THese include The Island , a replica of the Enterprise CVN bridge, and Balaonoptera Musculus , a foamcore whale inspired by the Museum of Natural History's famous model.

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In the course of the last ten years, Tom Sachs has distinguished himself as a significant artist with a remarkable visual language. In this exhibition we focus on his use of brands and deeper reflections on them. The exhibition is divided into three main categories: America, Modernism and Fashion.

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A grand and comprehensive tour of today's American city from the perspective of a Mini-Z racer. Stops include McDonald's, Le Corbusier's Unité , the ghetto, and a sculpture garden. Don't forget your bong hit, too.

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Themes of space and modern technology pervade Tom's second exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Galerie in Paris.

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In the age of mass production and planned obsolescence, Sachs' work speaks to the beauty of handicrafts and bricolage. By proudly proclaiming his works as “fucked up”, the artist elevates and celebrates each sculpture’s unique scars and stories.

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Morris-Healy Gallery hosts the artist's first solo exhibition in New York, featuring a series of works cobbled-together in Sachs' bespoke technique – from duct tape and phone books, to plywood and luxury packaging.