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.”
