Press release

The Baldwin Gallery presents its third solo show with Tom Sachs: The Bronze Collection. Sachs’ show consists of 12 works of self-formulated bricolage cast in bronze. The new works include sculpted commercial icons such as dead batteries once strewn about Sachs’ studio and a mundane skateboard ramp. Sachs wields his craftsmanship around his observations of consumer culture including iconic images such as “Hello Kitty” and “Miffy”. Playing on the discernment and capricious nature of value, Sachs’ works are sprinkled with vestiges of irony. They are whimsical while functional, pure while somber, vacant vessels of nothingness while symbolic carriers of meanings. They are ordinary objects, simple shapes, and primary colors ennobled by bronze. The fountains weep, the skateboard ramp screams, and the batteries stand tall. The Bronze Collection was first viewed on May 8, 2008 at the Lever House in New York City, the first Bauhaus building in America, for which the pieces were commissioned.

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.

Additionally, the Baldwin Gallery presents its first show with the internationally acclaimed New York artist Will Cotton. The artist will showcase four new paintings and a series of oil drawings on paper that emphasize his distinctive pairing of classical figure drawing of the female form amidst a landscape of luscious candyland settings. Using real life maquettes of candies and cakes that he creates in his studio, Cotton is able to let these paintings record an existent place of desire, decadence and sensuality. Cotton states that his candyland backdrops are “an imagined utopia whose exact geographical location is elusive. It’s the idea of a land of plenty where all is pleasure and there’s no such thing as work. It’s about imagining the possibility of constant indulgence.” For the first time in this body of work, Cotton introduces atmosphere as a narrative element by successfully depicting spaces in the way they exist in memory in order to allow the viewer to experience an almost hauntingly familiar presence. Cotton’s first exhibited sculpture will also be on view at Baldwin Gallery. The sumptuous white butter cream cake with generous peaks of frosting and pools of fudge, is made out of polystyrene, acrylic polymer, pigment, and gypsum and hails from the same candy-colored luscious world that is depicted in Cotton’s paintings.

Will Cotton was born in Melrose, Massachusetts. He studied art at Cooper Union, New York City, spending a semester at the École Regionale des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, France. He also studied for a year at the New York Academy of Art in New York City, where he currently resides. His paintings have been included in numerous group shows throughout the United States and Europe.

The Baldwin Gallery also presents its second show with Matthew Weinstein, a New York born and based artist whose digitalized drawings and videos explore the often ambiguous line between reality and unreality in an American culture that increasingly experiences reality through the filter of a virtual world. In contrast to the precision like rendering of Weinstein’s sculptural compositions, the overall impact of the work is one of unreality, or rather “hyperclarity”, in which reality and unreality merge together, becoming indistinguishable. Drawing on a number on influences, most notably early Japanese animation, Weinstein sets up a contrast balance between real and abstract as well as nature and artifice. The artist will premiere a new animated video installation entitled Siam, in which he both wrote the music and choreographed the performance. Weinstein creates his videos using the 3-D modeling and rendering program, Maya.

Born in New York, Matthew Weinstein earned a B.A. from Columbia University in 1987. His art has been exhibited in Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, the Netherlands, Italy, and the United States.

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