Q&A artist Tom Sachs with artist and professor Matt Bollinger
Tuesday, May. 2 2017, 7:30
Tom Sachs' genre-defying mixed media sculptures, often recreations of modern icons using everyday materials, show all of the work that goes into producing an object—a reversal of modernization's trend towards products with cleaner, simpler, and more perfect edges. His sculptures are conspicuously handmade, lovingly cobbled together from plywood, resin, steel, and ceramic. Sachs' Space Program first launched in 2007 with a mission to the moon at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles. In 2012, at NYC’s Park Avenue Armory, he and his team took his Space Program to Mars on a journey that, through their labor and commitment, became as real as any other NASA mission—and which is captured in the film A Space Program.
Sachs' work has been included in many exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad, and is in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne in Kunst, Oslo. Major solo exhibitions include the Contemporary Austin (2015), Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2009), Fondazione Prada, Milan (2006), Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, and SITE Santa Fe (1999).
He lives and works in New York.
Matt Bollinger makes work based on narratives collaged out of personal experiences, first- and second-hand research, and fictional situations. Recent works have examined family stories built from in-depth interviews, generated alter egos inhabiting the artist's own home, and utilized stop-motion animation in the search of transformative moments in everyday experience. Drawing and painting form the core of his studio, whether as a means to depict an imaginary scenario or as a tool to deconstruct and rebuild memories. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in New York, Paris, and elsewhere. Recent museum exhibitions have been at the Nerman Museum (2016) and Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Saint-Étienne Métropole (2016). He is represented by Zürcher Gallery and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He is an Assistant Professor in the School of Art + Design at Purchase College.
