Tom Sachs "Painting"

For this exhibition, Sachs has immersed himself in paintings Pablo Picasso produced during his so-called ‘War Years’, between 1937 and 1945, reimagining Picasso’s work using his own distinctive painterly language.

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Sachs also challenges Picasso by contrasting him with two opponents: longstanding rival Marcel Duchamp and a more contemporary adversary, Lisa Simpson. This exhibition brings Sachs’s reinterpretations of Picasso, Duchamp and Simpson’s works into conversation to create a wry reflection on the purpose of painting.

 

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Painting is a medium American artist Tom Sachs has returned to several times over the years. The works in this exhibition were conceptualised in a period of focus on drawing and colour for the artist. All produced within the past year, these works demonstrate the expansion of the boundaries of Sachs’s pools of inspiration and the continued innovation of his practice.

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If you want to learn how to paint, start by painting your own Picasso. — Tom Sachs

 

Exploring the lines and forms used by Picasso in the Spanish painter’s lesser-known works created starting in 1937, Sachs found parallels with his own practice. The thick lines that recur in Sachs’s work, originating from the influence of American graffiti and street art, mimic the solid black linework that delineates many of Picasso’s figures.

Tom Sachs
Seated Woman, 2023
Synthetic polymer and Krink on canvas
101.6 x 76.2 cm (40 x 30 in)

Sachs’s choice of the works he would reimagine for the exhibition reflects many of the notions he discovered in Picasso’s works that vibrantly resonated in a contemporary context.

 

Tom Sachs

La Femme-Fleur (Françoise Gilot), 2023

Synthetic polymer and ink on canvas

183 x 152.4 cm (72 x 60 in)

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The horrors of war and the reality of mortality weighed heavily on Picasso. As such, the still lifes in the exhibition are devoid of softer memento mori – fruit or flowers, for example – and are instead centred around human skulls, the heads of beasts, and the barbed forms of sea urchins.

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Exploring the lines and forms used by Picasso in the Spanish painter’s lesser-known works created starting in 1937, Sachs found parallels with his own practice. The thick lines that recur in Sachs’s work, originating from the influence of American graffiti and street art, mimic the solid black linework that delineates many of Picasso’s figures.

 

Tom Sachs
Still Life with Skull and Three Sea Urchins, 2023
Synthetic polymer and Krink on canvas
101.6 x 121.9 cm (40 x 48 in)

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. In the years since, the artist has explored a range of media, reconstructing the objects he desired with the materials available to him. The only sculpture in the exhibition, his reimagining of Picasso’s Death’s Head is carved out of a painted block of wood, with some of its painted coating remaining visible in the finished piece. Conspicuously handmade, the sculpture draws the viewer’s attention to its production techniques in a reversal of modernisation’s trend towards cleaner, simpler and more perfect machine-made items.

 

Tom Sachs

Death's Head bronze, 2023

Enamel on bronze

24.8 x 22.9 x 32.1 cm (9.75 x 9 x 12.625 in)

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In contrast to the sober themes of the sculpture and the still lifes Sachs has chosen to reimagine for the exhibition, Picasso’s playful and touching scenes of childhood – often depicting children from his own family and from his entourage – seem to connect movement and life with the hope of a new generation.

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Tom Sachs

Boy with Lobster, 2023

Synthetic polymer and ink on canvas

182.9 x 153 cm (72.01 x 60.24 in)

Tom Sachs

Child Playing with Toy Truck, 2023

Synthetic polymer and Krink on canvas

182.9 x 152.4 cm (72 x 60 in)

Each Picasso work is recreated true to scale. Sachs credits them to Picasso using their original dates and titles, while also adding a new frame around them and his own signature in his characteristic black brushwork — additions that allow him to recontextualise them and make them his own. The traces of each work’s creation, meanwhile, are left apparent, with measurement lines erased and repainted. By making visible the construction processes of the artworks he recreates, the artist invites the viewer to examine their own relationship to art-historical artefacts.

Tom Sachs
First Steps, 2023
Acrylic and Krink on canvas
182.9 x 152.9 cm (72.01 x 60.2 in)

Pablo Picasso
First Steps, 1943
Oil on canvas
130.2 x 97.1 cm (51 1/4 x 38 1/4 in)

 

Sachs’s affinity with aspects of Picasso’s work is intriguingly disrupted by the critical eye he has long cast on traditional methods of artmaking used by artists such as Picasso, as Sachs, like Duchamp, invites viewers to see everyday objects as sculpture. In the midst of the journey through Picasso’s work with its meandering lines and blended colours, Duchamp’s bold black, red and white Rotorelief introduces the viewer to the rivalry between the two leaders of Modern art.

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While Picasso’s works are recreated at their original scale, Sachs’s reimagination of Duchamp’s Rotorelief dramatically expands it to 10 times its initial size. With its imposing new scale, strength of colour and sharp lines, the single Duchamp piece finds its voice among the Picassos that surround it, encouraging the viewer to engage with the challenge that it poses to more traditional conceptions of what constitutes a work of art.

When Duchamp debuted his Rotoreliefs in 1935, at 20 centimetres in diameter, the discs were a commercial object – exhibited at a fair for inventors, they were marketed as optical illusions rather than paintings to be hung on a wall. Sachs’s longstanding interest in mass production, industrialisation and commercialism, and his exploration of and playful engagement with these themes in his own practice, would have placed him firmly in Duchamp’s camp, rather than in Picasso’s. As such, through his reworking of Rotorelief for the exhibition, Sachs’s fascination with the place of consumerism in art provides a counterpoint to the purist approach represented by Picasso.

 

Tom Sachs

Rotorelief, 2023

Acrylic, Krink, and hardware on panel

152.4 x 121.9 cm (60 x 47.99 in)

 

Marcel Duchamp

Rotorelief (Optical Disk), 1935

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Women were frequently included in Picasso’s paintings, often through the lens of their relationships with him and as symbols bearing the world’s pain. Sachs’s unexpected inclusion of his version of a work by ‘Lisa Simpson’, a character from the animated television series The Simpsons – a ‘painter’ who is both female and fictional – is a direct challenge to Picasso’s approach.

Echoing a key tenet of Sachs’s own work, finding a place for humour, irony and play in artmaking, the character, who has no formal training, paints for pleasure and has no personal relationship to Picasso, is the ultimate rival that Picasso could not have anticipated. Her painting, which hangs over the iconic Simpsons sofa – and which Sachs ventures might well be ‘the most seen painting in the world’ – makes Lisa a formidable opponent. By placing a Lisa Simpson work in dialogue with his recreations of Picasso’s and Duchamp’s, Sachs suggests a fresh alternative to established perspectives on what art is for. In introducing Picasso to Lisa Simpson, Tom Sachs completes his ultimate Duchampian gesture.

 

Tom Sachs

Scenes from Moby Dick, 2023

Acrylic and krink on canvas

91.4 x 106.7 cm (35.98 x 42.01 in)

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