SEOUL.- Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul presents Tom Sachss investigation into the Modernist painter and sculptor Pablo Picasso. The exhibition centres around a group of new sculptures, which Sachs created in a bricolage of found objects after the Spanish artists originals before casting them in bronze. The sculptures are accompanied by painted and drawn reimaginings of Picassos works in Sachss own distinctive pictorial language, which provoke visitors to reflect on what makes a painting.
A relentlessly innovative and subversive sculptor, Sachs is best known for his elaborate bricolage recreations of masterpieces of art, design and engineering. In the 1990s, he spent days studying Piet Mondrian's paintings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, using duct tape on plywood to recreate several of them. It was through these early explorations that he began to develop his methodology, and in the years since, he has continued engaging with the masters of Modernism, notably exploring the architecture of Le Corbusier for the 2010 Venice Biennale of Architecture. His works are conspicuously handmade and heighten our awareness of production techniques, in a reversal of modernisation's trend towards cleaner, simpler and more perfect machine-made items.
In recent years, in his New York studio, Sachs has surrounded himself with the work of Pablo Picasso, whose name is, for Sachs, synonymous with art. As well as sculpting according to traditional methods, such as carving from wood or modelling in clay, Picasso spearheaded a new approach to making sculpture from diverse found materials. These assemblages resonated with Sachss process of reconstructing objects he desired with the materials that were available to him and intentionally revealing his process, with all its challenges and imperfections. Reinterpreting Picassos sculptures through a contemporary bricolage replacing Picassos chicken wire and nails with car parts and a Nerf football Sachs takes up the gauntlet of the challenge his predecessor mounted against conventional artistic practices by bringing it into a contemporary context. Though he constructs them like Picasso did, Sachs then casts his sculptures in bronze using the ancient lost wax technique before giving them each a meticulous paint or patina finish, reversing the direction of the Modernist tradition to solidify the position of each of the works on view as an art object in the classical sense.
The paintings and works on paper exhibited at Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul represent the continuation of a period of focus on painting, drawing and colour for the artist, and stem from his fascination with Picassos War Years, between 1937 and 1945. Exploring the lines and forms used by the Spanish painter during this period in his output, Sachs found parallels with his own practice. The thick lines that recur in Sachss work, originating from the influence of American graffiti and street art, mimic the solid black linework that delineates many of Picassos figures from that period. Sachs leaves traces of the works creation apparent through visible measurement lines and dimensions: where previous examples from the series recreated Picassos works at their original scale, in these recent examples, Sachs dramatically scales up some of the paintings, drawing attention to the process of reproduction. As the artist says: Painting is a verb. Its an action, its an activity. All these paintings are about the process of making them more than the finished product. By encouraging visitors to engage with this process, Sachs invites them to examine their own relationship to art-historical artefacts.
The exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul brings Sachss explorations of Picasso across mediums sculpture, painting and drawing into dialogue, but, for the artist, all the works on view are sculptures. As he explains: I always think about sculpture first. And these, sure, theyre paintings, its paint on canvas, but really theyre built the way a sculpture is built. And I dont really make a distinction between a painting and a sculpture or a shoe or a video [...]. Its all sculpture to me, in that its built. The evidence of the making is always in the finished product.