NEW YORK.- Fondazione Prada, a contemporary art foundation founded by Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli, will launch Tom Sachs’ eponymous new book which takes a look at this complete works from 1990-present. Sachs was one of Fondazione Prada’s featured artists for 2006, and is releasing this book in a special limited addition. The book was edited by Germano Celant. This comprehensive survey of the work of the young and influential American sculptor Tom Sachs is the first of its kind, and long overdue. Sachs appropriates elements from American popular culture, including fast food, skateboarding and hip-hop music, and mixes them with overt references to luxury fashion labels, as well as icons of Modernist art and design. Even as Sachs's work maintains an overt antagonism toward consumerism and globalization, it reveals an inherent idealism, championing transparency of production and homespun craftsmanship. Produced on the occasion of the artist's solo exhibition at the Fondazione Prada, Milan, this book illustrates the prolific and innovative nature of Sachs's career, highlighting his fascination with weapons, conformity, cultural imperialism and craft.

The LIMITED EDITION comes with a with a clutch cover made with Prada fabric Logo Jacquard in cotton and polyester (the same fire-proof fabric used for travel luggage). Sachs personally tested the fabric with a high temperature branding iron, with the intention to vandalize the Prada object. His attempt melted the fireproof fabric and destroyed it. Beneath the clutch, there is a red leather cover with a black Prada nylon interior. Each copy includes the Tom Sachs catalogue and a signed copy of the Island Guide manual. The edition is limited to 150 signed and numbered copies, available by special order at the NY Prada Epicenter store from November 13 on, and through D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers.

Tom Sachs was born in New York in 1966, and he grew up in suburban Connecticut. Sachs attended Bennington College, and afterwards he spent two years at the Architectural Association in London. Following that, he went to work for architect Frank Gehry, building the prototype for the bent-wood chairs Gehry designed for Knoll. In 1992, Sachs moved to New York, where he worked on display sculptures at Barneys, including clothing racks welded out of 22,000 pennies for the Azzedine Alaia boutique. His most notorious Barneys installation, which was written up by the New York Daily News and taken out of the window after only one day due to pressure from religious groups, was a nativity scene featuring Hello Kitty as the baby Jesus, three Bart Simpsons as the Magi, and a pregnant rendition of the pop star Madonna as the virgin mother. Since then, Sachs’s name has seldom been out of the news. When he displayed live ammunition and working homemade wooden guns at Mary Boone’s uptown gallery in 1999, his legendary dealer was arrested for unlawful distribution of ammunition, possession of unlawful weapons and resisting arrest. Sachs’s famously crafty work has been exhibited in solo shows at galleries throughout Europe and the United States.