Tom Sachs

Tom Sachs creates thought-provoking works that blend elements of pop culture, consumerism and industrial design. His sculptures — often subverting traditional notions of the art form — combine a myriad of cultural reference points and act as a driver for Sach’s social inquiry. They give the viewer the opportunity to decide where they stand on the axis of comedy and seriousness.

Sachs was born in 1966 in New York City. The artist studied at the Architectural Association in London and Bennington College in Vermont, where he began developing his distinctive approach to art that often involves the meticulous recreation of iconic objects and brands.

Tom Sachs’s work often critiques and reinterprets symbols of consumerism, luxury and technology, offering a commentary on society’s obsession with branding and materialism. In 1994, while working at Barneys in New York, 28-year-old Sachs was invited to create one of the luxury department store’s iconic Christmas window displays. He created a Nativity scene featuring Hello Kitty as Christ, Madonna as the Virgin Mary, Bart Simpson as each of the three Kings, and a McDonald’s label stamped upon the holy stable.

In 1996, Sachs hand customised a reissued Hermès Kelly bag with the NASA logo, which has become on ongoing motif for his practice and a metaphor for his penchant for innovation. Sachs makes everything available to himself as a source of inspiration and recombination, suggesting that culture itself is not a source of hierarchies, but rather of limitless possibilities.

Sachs is known to pair luxury fashion brands with violent or incongruous subject matters in his investigation into deconstructing the contemporary luxury culture. ‘The thing that we are always looking for in art is authenticity,’ Sach said, ‘That’s the holy grail in all art, whether it’s paintings, sculpture, or commercial art. We are always trying to deliver authenticity.’ The result is some of his most famous works, including Chanel Guillotine (2000), which created a provocative statement on the intersection of wealth, power and violence.

Tom Sachs has exhibited internationally, and his works can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and more. In 2022, Christie’s New York sold Sachs’s Tiffany Value Meal (1998) for US$302,400, setting a world auction record for the artist.