Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg takes pleasure in presentating the Skateboards Edition by the American artist Tom Sachs. The opening of the exhibition will be held at 7 p.m. on May 30th in the Edition Space of the gallery.
Editions are of artistic value when the artist's aesthetic strategies are successfully rendered in the medium. In Tom Sachs's sculptures and paintings, as well as in his editions, the aesthetic principles of handcrafting play a major role. The handcrafted elements give the Skateboards precisely this bricolage aesthetic that Sachs aims to achieve. It is the numbering - the artist's decision to define an object as one of a series - that makes the sculptures an Edition.
And this is the exciting thing about Tom Sachs's Editions: although conceived as a series, they never quite abandon their unique character. The Skateboards (2009) and his Big Mac Boxes (2007) are all the same, but each tiny stage of the production process is prompted by the artist, and he shapes and finishes the objects himself. This makes each object in Sachs's series unique, even if they are part of a series.
Sachs is probably best known for his re-creations of modern icons, as well as for his sculptures of original toys, such as Hello Kitty, My Melody and Miffy. Galerie Ropac recently showed a monumental group of these three figures in the Trocadero in Paris.
Tom Sachs (b 1966) lives in New York. He studied at the Architectural Association in London in 1987 and graduated from Bennington College, Vermont, in 1989. His work has been shown at many exhibitions in Europe and the USA, including Logjam, Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (2007), Fondazione Prada, Milan, Survey: America, Modernism, Fashion, at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2006), and NUTSY's Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2003). He is represented in various collections, including: Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco.
