Lora Reynolds is pleased to announce Nuggets, an exhibition of sculpture by Tom Sachs. This is the artist’s first solo presentation at Lora Reynolds Gallery.

A boombox, a Barbie doll, a cleaver—each is a product of modern industrial design that most people use without thinking about how it was made or where it came from. Even when taking a moment to consider their design and manufacture, these objects still seem rather miraculous—borne of high-tech machines and materials we know little about. Sachs’s sculptures are conspicuously handmade recreations of such products—cobbled together from wood, epoxy, ceramic, and sometimes electrical components—that often, surprisingly, function just as well as their mass-produced counterparts.

Sachs trains his army of assistants to approach art-making tasks with a rigorous messiness that has become a trademark of the Tom Sachs Studio. The goal of this practice is to show as much of the work as possible that went into producing any given object—a reversal of modernization’s trend toward products with cleaner, simpler, more perfect edges. Part of Sachs’s Glue Gun Manifesto, written for his production assistants, reads:

The scars and imperfections in a Sachs sculpture tell the story of how it came into being, give it a history and a personality, and remove it from the realm of miraculous conception. And they stress the importance of self-awareness and skepticism when interacting with the modern world, to help avoid falling into the trap of blind, thoughtless consumption. In the artist’s own words:

Tom Sachs was born in New York in 1966. He has had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Austin, Deutsche Guggenheim (Berlin), Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Connecticut), SITE Santa Fe, and Fondazione Prada (Milan). Some institutions that have his work in their collections include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), and Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst (Oslo). Sachs lives and works in New York.