Tom Sachs

Tom Sachs is a contemporary artist who lives and works in New York.

Born in New York City in 1966, Sachs grew up in Westport, Connecticut and attended Greens Farms Academy for high school. He attended Bennington College in Vermont. Following graduation, he studied architecture in London before deciding to return to the States and started making sculpture and other art objects. In 1994, Sachs created a Christmas scene for the windows at Barneys New York entitled "Hello Kitty Nativity" where the Virgin Mary was replaced by Hello Kitty dressed in Chanel and Nike. This contemporary revision of the traditional nativity scene received great attention and demonstrated Sachs' interest in the phenomenona of consumerism, branding, and the cultural fetishization of products. In 1997, with the perspective that all "products" are equal, Sachs created Allied Cultural Prosthetics - thereby giving his studio a formal name - and began to utilize logos and design elements from major fashion houses and other instantly recognizable brands in his work.

Interested from the beginning in "bricolage" or "do-it-yourself" in French, Sachs organized an exhibition at Sperone Westwater in 2000 entitled "American Bricolage" that featured the work of 12 artists from Alexander Calder to Tom Friedman. The exhibition's catalogue describes the "bricoleur" as one "who hobbles together functional contraptions out of already given or collected materials which he re-tools and re-signifies info new objects with novel uses, but more importantly, which he regenerates into a new, oscillating syntax: one of loss, gain, and more than anything, one of play.

After several solo exhibitions in New York and abroad, Sachs showed his major installation "Nutsy's" at the Deutsche Guggenheim in 2003. According to one art critic who experienced the installation: "Like Grand Theft Auto, Tom Sachs' current installation for the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin offers a miniature likeness of a reality steeped in the laws of consumerist society. It comes as no surprise that Sachs, a video game enthusiast, ignores the boundaries between "high" and "low": without comment, modernist icons stand as equals next to the flagships of global consumerism and symbols of contemporary leisure culture. Just like in a computer game, visitors to the exhibition get a chance to relinquish the passive role ordinarily accorded to them and become actors in this gigantic bricolage by driving one of the racing cars through the installation."

In 2006, the artist had two major survey exhibitions mounted in Europe, first at the Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst and next at the Fondazione Prada, Milan. His work can be found in major museum collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

As Germano Celant writes in his recent monograph on the artist published by the Fondazione Prada, Milan, "The images and objects that make up the militarized space of consumption and fashion are at the very heart of Tom Sachs's visual passion."

The Des Moines Art Center is currently hosting a solo exhibition titled LogJam featuring the artist. It ran through August 26, 2007.

Less than a month later, on September 25, 2007, the exhibit moved to the Rose Art Museum, located on the Brandeis University campus in Waltham, MA.

Sachs is represented by Sperone Westwater, New York and Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris and Salzburg.