Tom Sachs (artist)
| Tom Sachs | |
|---|---|
| Born |
July 26, 1966 New York City, New York |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Sculpture |
Tom Sachs (born July 26, 1966) is an American contemporary artist who lives and works in New York City.
Born in New York City on July 26, 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 at London's Architectural Association School of Architecture before deciding to return to the States, where he spent two years working in Frank Gehry's L.A. furniture shop. It is here that he began using the term knolling.
Sachs moved from L.A. to New York City around 1990 and found a studio in the disappearing machinery district downtown. His studio, Allied Cultural Prosthetics, took its name from the previous tenant—Allied Machine Exchange—implying that contemporary culture had become nothing but a prosthetic for real culture.
For a few years Sachs worked odd jobs, including lighting displays at Barneys New York. In 1994, he was invited to create a scene for their Christmas displays and titled it Hello Kitty Nativity, in which the Virgin Mary was replaced by Hello Kitty with an open Chanel bra, the three Kings were Bart Simpsons, and the stable was marked by a McDonald's logo. This contemporary revision of the nativity scene received great attention (not all of it positive) and demonstrated Sachs' interest in the phenomena of consumerism, branding, and the cultural fetishization of products.
In the mid and late 1990s, Sachs' career began to take off. His first major solo show, "Cultural Prosthetics"[1], opened at New York's Morris-Healy Gallery in 1995. Many works from the show conflated fashion and violence, as with HG (Hermès Hand Grenade) (1995) and Tiffany Glock (Model 19) (1995)[2], both of which were models made with Hermès or Tiffany packaging. Although these sculptures were non-functional, another piece - Hecho in Switzerland (1995) - was an actual working homemade gun. Sachs and his assistants would make similar guns and sell them back to the city as part of New York's gun buyback program (for up to $300 each).
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