11 January – 12 February 2011

For his fifth solo show in the Paris gallery, Tom Sachs selected an iconic group of drawings from the last decade covering the central themes of his oeuvre related to American society and culture. Works on paper have always been an integral and important part of Toms Sachs's practice and this is the first time an entire exhibition is dedicated to this relevant and direct means of communication.

While a part of Sachs's drawings are sketches for an idea of a sculpture, a way to conceptualize his projects (for example the McDonald's drawings and Waffle Bike, 2007), some of them take on the form of diagrams, floor plans, or lists, becoming almost text-based. In the floor plans of Room 134 at the Claridge's (2008) or the Indochine Restaurant (2008) Sachs draws the minutia of every area, angle, furniture, object, and sign, as well as a detailed list of names of those in the restaurant that day.

In the same way that Sachs's foamcore sculptures are born out of bricolage, in which the hand of the artist is visible, the covered up or concealed mistakes remain apparent in the drawings and reveal the artist's thought process as it unfolds before the eyes of the viewer. Often what looks like a disordered accumulation of unrelated ideas belies his own very instinctive sense of order. Different ideas are represented in the same way; the drawings can be associated to carpentry because of their labor-intensive aspect. As Gunnar B. Kvaran explains, "The world of Tom Sachs is an ambitious and focused enumeration of things and phenomena that characterize our standardized way of living." 

Video by Nikolai Saoulski

© Thaddaeus Ropac 2011