Tom Sachs valuation
New York sculptor of handmade copies of desirable things, from a Knoll office to the Apollo lunar module, in plywood and duct tape.
Tom Sachs was born in New York in 1966, grew up in Westport, Connecticut, graduated from Bennington College in Vermont in 1989 and studied at the Architectural Association in London.
What a work by Tom Sachs is worth
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Bio
Tom Sachs was born in New York in 1966, grew up in Westport, Connecticut, graduated from Bennington College in Vermont in 1989 and studied at the Architectural Association in London. He worked in Frank Gehry's furniture workshop in Los Angeles before setting up his studio in New York around 1990. His sculpture rebuilds objects of design, engineering and desire by hand from humble materials, plywood, foam core, duct tape, resin and hardware, leaving every seam, screw and smear of glue on show: Mondrian paintings in duct tape, Knoll office furniture from phone books, Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in foam core, a full-size McDonald's frying station and the bridge of the USS Enterprise. In 1994 his Hello Kitty Nativity for a Barneys Christmas window drew attention and anger, and his works with Chanel, Prada and Hermès branding have kept consumerism in his sights. His Space Program has staged handmade missions to the Moon, Mars and Europa, with spacecraft, equipment and trained crew, most famously at the Park Avenue Armory in New York in 2012, and he has designed shoes with Nike.
Bronzes in editions, boomboxes, smaller sculptures, paintings and works on paper come up more often than the large installations. His works are deliberately handmade and their marks are part of the work, but foam core, tape, plywood and resin degrade and loosen with age, so condition and stable storage matter, and components and accessories should be complete. The studio's documentation and a provenance through Sperone Westwater or Thaddaeus Ropac support a work.
Westport, Gehry's workshop and the Space Program
The Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo held a survey in 2006, the year of an exhibition at the Fondazione Prada in Milan, and the Brooklyn Museum showed Boombox Retrospective 1999 to 2016 in 2016.
Tea Ceremony, his reworking of the Japanese tea ceremony, was shown at the Noguchi Museum in New York and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas in 2016 and 2017.
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