Tom Sachs (American, b. 1966) is a sculptor who recreates icons of engineering, design and consumer culture — spacecraft, McDonald's restaurants, boomboxes — from humble materials like foamcore, plywood and glue.,,His works are conspicuously handmade, deliberately revealing the screws, seams and imperfections of their own construction.,Based in New York City, he runs his studio like a teaching hospital or cult built around an ethos of transparency.,
Sachs studied at the Architectural Association in London in 1987 and received a BA from Bennington College in Vermont in 1989.In the 1990s he spent days studying Piet Mondrian's paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, recreating them in duct tape on plywood — the process that shaped his studio's ethos of visibly reconstructing objects from the materials at hand. His practice also uses pyrography, the art of wood-burning, and marquetry, the inlaying of wood pieces. As he has put it, “I think that art is to industry as dreams are to reality.”
In 2007, Sachs opened his exhibition “Space Program” at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. That year he also completed a replica of the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module, reflecting his interest in space exploration and Cold War history.He has also codified his studio's working philosophy on film in Ten Bullets, and in its 2019 sequel Paradox Bullets, narrated by Werner Herzog and featuring the artist Ed Ruscha, which explores each rule's equally valid opposite.
In 2016 the Noguchi Museum hosted “Tea Ceremony”, a solo presentation combining Sachs's long-running research into the Japanese tea ceremony with Noguchi's sculptural legacy — the museum's first solo show by an artist other than Noguchi himself.,His work is held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others, and he is represented by galleries including Thaddaeus Ropac and Acquavella.,,
In 2021 Sachs launched his own NFT project, Rocket Factory, which won “Best Rocket Launch” at the 2022 Wallpaper Design Awards.,One physical rocket from the project, Too Darn Hot, was launched at LACMA in 2021 and later entered the museum's collection. A subsequent silkscreen print edition combined a debossed record of that launch with a rubber-stamped edition number and a UV-printed QR code linking to the NFT's blockchain metadata, authenticated further by a tamper-proof holographic sticker, with a share of proceeds donated to LACMA.
