NEW YORK, NY.- Acquavella Galleries is presenting its fifth solo exhibition with Tom Sachs. Titled Bronze, the exhibition features new and recent bronze sculptures by the artist and is on view at the New York gallery from November 7—December 13, 2024.
In this exhibition, Sachs continues his formal investigation and exploration of the modernist canon. Guided by the iconoclastic spirit and wit of Marcel Duchamp’s iconic “readymades,” Sachs employs his signature bricolage technique to reimagine sculptures by Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brancusi. Drawing on an interplay between technical production and quotidian materials, these sculptures question traditional conceptions of what constitutes a work of art, continuing Sachs’s exploration of the conceptual legacy and art historical challenges first posed by Duchamp. Previous bodies of work have also engaged the annals of modernism, including Sachs’s take on Piet Mondrian’s abstractions in the 1990s, recreated out of duct tape and plywood; foamcore interpretations of Le Corbusier's housing complexes in the aughts; and, more recently, the reimagining of Picasso’s paintings, particularly from the so-called “war years” period between 1937 and 1945.
Bronze features twelve sculptures, each constructed from a bricolage of found, everyday objects, which have been cast in bronze and painted with enamel. Drawing from Picasso’s sculpted oeuvre, Sachs’s new works are in dialogue with sculptures the Spanish artist created from the 1930s through the early 1950s, many of which were also assemblage sculptures constructed out of found materials.
Sachs’s practice of handcraft and DIY engineering both channels and reimagines Picasso’s objects through his own distinct visual language. Studying Picasso’s use of assemblage, Sachs also investigates the connection between the Spanish master and Duchamp; for Sachs, the two artists represent “the two great titans” of modern art: “It’s raw Dionysian spirit versus Apollonian intellectualism. It’s painting with a capital P and non-retinal conceptual art.” Sachs’s resulting works represent a multilayered transformation—catapulting these iconic modernist works and conversations into the contemporary world, recontextualizing them, and reaffirming their cultural relevance.
A reconstruction of a haunting 1941 sculpture by Picasso, in Death’s Head, Sachs used a chainsaw to carve a found piece of wood into a roughly hewn, evocative image of a skull. Picasso created the original Death’s Head during the Occupation of Paris during World War II, when the Nazi regime had strict criteria for what constituted “moral” forms of art. While they championed classical examples of Western art, modernists like Picasso were deemed “degenerate.” It was during this time that Picasso made the bold choice to cast Death’s Head in bronze, which was strictly forbidden as all metal was reallocated towards the Nazi war effort. By defiantly disregarding this decree, Picasso gave his work a chance at permanence.
By casting his own bricolage assemblages of found materials into bronze, Sachs explores this process of transmutation that happens through the casting process, transforming everyday objects into bronze. In so doing, he probes the definitions of art and explores the dialogues set forth by modernism—the distinction between conceptual art and “retinal” art, and the boundaries between “high” and “low,” the sublimated and the everyday.
The exhibition is open Monday-Saturday from November 7-December 13, 2024. The gallery will be closed November 28-29th and December 7th.
