Please note the gallery will be closing to the public at 4:30pm on November 17th.

New York, NY — September 14, 2022 – Acquavella Galleries is pleased to present its third exhibition with New York-based artist Tom Sachs. Titled Spaceships, this group of new and recent sculptures and paintings will be on view at Acquavella New York, opening on October 7.

In this exhibition, Sachs investigates the accepted understandings, assumptions, epistemology, and consensus of what constitutes a spaceship. By tracing its evolving historical and linguistic understanding, the artist explores a spaceship’s physical, metaphysical, and spiritual possibilities. Sachs offers the formal criteria defining a spaceship as an object that has the ability to move us from one state to another. In its most commonly understood form, a spaceship takes us from the dimension of earth to space. Sachs challenges this narrow definition and investigates vessels that can also metaphysically and spiritually transport. From Sachs’ perspective, the guillotine—in addition to its primary function—is a transportation device, as it takes a person from life to death, or the afterlife. A cathedral or a place of worship is a spaceship, as are our bodies, which, at their most fundamental, are metaphysical spaceships—multidimensional organic vessels that carry our genetic code. 

Sachs’ new work, Titanic (2022), a plywood sculpture of the ill-fated 1912 ocean liner, is an early example of a spaceship, as a symbol of the evolution of major developments in transportation across worlds—bridging the old to the new. While language may evolve, form and function within Sachs’ paradigm stays the same. In fact, large ocean liners like the Titanic were guided using navigational technologies similar to the reaction control systems (RCS) used in space travel today to guide and influence their course.

Technics 1200MK3D (2022), a handmade plywood sculpture of a turntable, is a spaceship that allows us to transcend linear time travel. Traditionally, a turntable gives us the ability to access information or sound in dynamic and random ways, achieved by placing the record needle anywhere on the disc and the choice to move it again from one place to another, backward and forward. This analog technology draws parallels to the multidimensionality of the internet age and the arbitrary non-sequential access of information it allows.

In Sachs’ choice to replicate the Technics 1200 model, which is considered by aficionados as the purest expression of analog recording technology, the artist transforms the turntable into the ultimate status symbol—a totem that represents his self-proclaimed devotion to consumerism. But as Sachs explains, “As I create, I meditate, and the lust of acquiring a product is replaced by the love of making it…” and here the artist’s true religion is expressed—through the ritual of work. Sachs’ signature marks of labor are evident in the hand-painted wording and wood burned control systems, as it is throughout the exhibition.

Tom Sachs explains, “There are three reasons people do anything— spirituality, sensuality, and stuff. Spirituality is asking the big questions: Are we alone? Where do we come from? Sensuality is going where no man has gone before: exploring space, the g-force of excitement, climbing the highest mountain, the smell of the tatami, the touch of the kimono… Stuff is the hardware: a spaceship, a cathedral, a tea bowl. That’s what we make. Our priority is sculpture, but it doesn’t mean shit without the ritual and without the spirituality and the reasons behind it. You’ve gotta have all three.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a hardcover book published by Rizzoli and includes essays by Thomas Crow and Daniel Pinchbeck.

About Acquavella Galleries

For over 100 years, Acquavella Galleries has dealt in paintings, sculptures, and works on paper of unparalleled quality. Renowned for its expertise in the fields of 19th, 20th, and 21st century art, the gallery has sold important paintings and sculpture to private collectors and museums world-wide and regularly presents museum-quality exhibitions of Impressionist, modern, postwar, and contemporary masters. Founded by Nicholas Acquavella in the early 1920s, the gallery is now a third-generation, family-owned business, run by Bill, Eleanor, Nicholas, and Alexander Acquavella: Bill joined his father Nicholas in 1960, Bill’s daughter Eleanor joined in 1997, and his sons Nicholas and Alexander joined in 2000 and 2003 respectively. 

Today, the gallery exhibits and deals in works by artists such as Francis Bacon, Jean Michel-Basquiat, Pierre Bonnard, Alexander Calder, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Willem de Kooning, Lucian Freud, Alberto Giacometti, Jasper Johns, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Wayne Thiebaud, and Andy Warhol, among the other giants of the late 19th, 20th, and early 21st century. On the primary market, the gallery represents contemporary artists Miquel Barceló, Wang Yan Cheng, Jacob El Hanani, Damian Loeb, and Tom Sachs.

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Media Contacts

Tyler Mahowald | THIRD EYE | tyler@hellothirdeye.com | +1 212-355-9009 x 311

Alison Peknay | THIRD EYE | alison@hellothirdeye.com | +1 212-355-9009 x 312