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An interview with Tom Sachs The artist on relinquishing his identity, the pursuit of perfection, and hard graft

24 October 2025

By George Nelson

Earlier this month, during Frieze Week, Tom Sachs was dishing out espressos and 86-proof mezcal from behind a bar at Thaddaeus Ropac’s London outpost on Dover Street. The American artist was launching his new show, “A Good Shelf” (on view through December 20), featuring 30 NASA-emblazoned ceramics inspired by Japanese tea bowls (chawans), ritual, bricolage, and space travel.

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Only a handful of living artists operate on Sachs’s scale, commanding a studio team that realizes ambitious, large-scale visions. Sachs, 59, whose auction record was set at just over $300,000 for his Tiffany Value Meal (1998) at Christie’s New York in 2022, is one of them. His oeuvre includes a life-size replica of the Apollo lunar excursion module for his “Space Program” series, a Chanel-branded guillotine (Chanel Guillotine [Breakfast Nook], 1998), and a 17-foot-long foamcore sculpture titled Unité (2001). The latter, a commentary on the commercialization of high modernism, is in the Guggenheim Museum’s permanent collection. His current show at Ropac continues themes from his 2012 exhibition “Space Program: Mars Mission,” when he created a bricolage version of the traditional Japanese tea ceremony—reimagined for the red planet.

The hand-formed ceramics in “A Good Shelf” symbolize Sachs’s pursuit of perfection, the balance of control and intuition, and the gradual relinquishing of artistic identity.

“Ceramics, without doubt, is the most complex of all crafts,” Sachs told ARTnews. “At almost 60 years old, I’ve dabbled in every possible craft. Ceramics is the most technically advanced. It involves the most error, science, and chemistry. In my hand-building, I’m always striving toward my ideal [artist], who is the 16th-century potter Chōjirō, the founder of Raku-ware [a type of Japanese pottery traditionally used in tea ceremonies]. As I get better, I’m giving up my character, because my ceramics are losing some of the identity and crappiness of being made by an individual.”