Tom Sachs

Press release

Baldwin Gallery is delighted to open its sixth solo show with artist Tom Sachs. Sachs has never forgotten the taste of post puberty yearnings. His works are the artifacts of fraught teenage dreams of an ‘outsider’ boy, NASA space flight viewed from a suburban boyhood bedroom, dreams of rambling testosterone blotted somedays, orange-skied humid evenings of sweat and stolen summer cigarettes in whatever parking lot we all congregate, pinewood derbies overgrown and brawny, backed by the blunted, metal soundtrack of teenage longing.

With this body of work, Sachs again fondles a heavy memory of DIY punk-rock ethos in a moment of specific time, returning to his iconography of sacred objects in a sweet sliver of gap between vinyl records and cd ascendence. Privacy and longing: the door shut on a late midcentury bedroom in a bedroom community, the sirens singing of getting away and ‘old enough’ in the intimate labor of piracy: tape to tape, maybe before you had high speed dubbing, popping through the write protection tab of tiny plastic locks for the overdub, noise reduction, hiss, turning the spindle tight with the eraser end of a Dixon Ticonderoga, the lapses and miscounts encoded as gifts. Sachs name-checks the brand names from pored over pages of glossy music mags, when the magic was print: TDK, Memorex, Maxell, JVC, and conjures flashback hours of private perfectionism compiling just the right song-string for your friends to see your cool, your love interest to feel your feelings, and played loud in the back of the team bus on the way to games, all love, access and dreams—overwritten in magnets and promising the future.

Tom Sachs was born in 1966 in New York and grew up in Westport, Connecticut. He has shown extensively in America, Europe and Japan. He was originally trained as an architect at the Architectural Association in London in 1987, briefly worked with architect Frank Gehry, and went on to receive his BA from Bennington College in 1989. His work is in numerous museum collections, and he has had solo exhibitions at such prestigious venues as the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, the Fondazione Prada, Milan, the Des Moines Art Center and Site Santa Fe.

Images are available upon request. Please call 970.920.9797 for further information.