ART CITIES: London-Tom Sachs

Tom Sachs is an internationally acclaimed artist. His four decades of bricolage sculptures invite viewers to participate in rigorously crafted and obsessively researched worlds. Throughout his artistic practice, Sachs challenges perceived hierarchies of materials and objects, treating each of his pieces, and what they’re made from, with equal amounts of curiosity, reverence, and devotion.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery Archive

With “A Good Shelf” Tom Sachs invites us into a world where ritual meets sculpture, and the handmade becomes both process and philosophy. The exhibition, an installation and working environment in one, brings together Sachs’s celebrated bricolage techniques with the ceramic practice he began in 2012. Thirty of the New York-based artist’s hand-formed ceramic vessels are displayed on singular, improvised shelves assembled from found materials. Accompanying them is Mezcaleria, a functioning coffee and mezcal bar, where art, labor, and daily ritual seamlessly intertwine. Sachs’s ceramics are functional in form — mezcal copitas, cortado cups, cereal or soup bowls — yet their lineage reaches back to the East Asian tea bowl, or chawan. The artist first turned to this archetype after his 2012 project “Space Program: Mars”, which imagined a bricolage version of the Japanese tea ceremony performed on the red planet. Over the past decade, Sachs has refined this investigation, treating the chawan as a vessel of both physical and metaphysical inquiry. “A Good Shelf” marks the first European exhibition dedicated solely to these ceramic works. For Sachs, the tea bowl embodies the same impulses that drive his fascination with space travel: the pursuit of spirituality, sensuality, and stuff. “Spirituality,” he explains, “is about asking the big existential questions — where we come from, whether we’re alone. Sensuality is about exploration: the exhilaration of g-force, the awe of the cathedral, the feel of the kimono, the taste of matcha. And stuff — that’s the hardware: the spaceship, the tea bowl, the chair. Our priority is sculpture. But sculpture doesn’t mean anything without that trinity and its rituals.” That trinity is visible in every aspect of “A Good Shelf.” Sachs’s ceramics — most often made from bright white English porcelain, occasionally from robust stoneware — bear the traces of his hand. Fingerprints, indentations, puckers, and asymmetries become evidence of labor, testifying to a kind of tactile devotion. Unlike the sleek, machine-made perfection of contemporary objects, these works assert the value of the imperfect, the human, and the sincere. “I use porcelain,” Sachs says, “because it shows the fingerprints.”

Each vessel begins with the same basic silhouette, modeled after the 16th-century Japanese ceramicist Chōjirō’s archetypal tea bowl. Sachs repeats this form with the precision and discipline of a conceptual artist, following a self-imposed set of rules. The repetition is not rote but meditative — a daily ritual of making that, as he puts it, “brings you to another dimension.” This serial process recalls the logic of Conceptual art and the systematic practices of artists like Sol LeWitt, whom Sachs openly reveres. His bowls are individually stamped, catalogued, and numbered — an ongoing archive of repetition and variation, where the act of making holds equal weight to the final object. These shelves — sculptures in their own right — are built from “sacred scrap”: plywood, hardware, and found materials salvaged from Sachs’s studio. Some cradle the ceramics like jewels, enclosed by mirrored backings that reflect both the object and the viewer. Others elevate the vessels on broom handles, poles, or even wings, humorously invoking the visual language of display and importance. Through this system of support, Sachs transforms ordinary detritus into altars for contemplation, reaffirming his belief that art can emerge from the most humble materials. Throughout his career, Sachs has resisted the sleek minimalism of modernist design, preferring instead a rough-hewn aesthetic that reveals the hand, the mistake, the process. A Good Shelf” continues this dialogue between craft and concept, tenderness and pragmatism. His bricolage shelves and porcelain bowls are bound by the same ethos: reverence for material, attention to ritual, and an insistence that imperfection is not a flaw but a form of truth. To coincide with the exhibition, Sachs has constructed Mezcaleria, a fully operational bar and sculpture installation within Thaddaeus Ropac London. Here, visitors are invited to participate in the artist’s vision of communal ritual — to drink, to talk, to handle the objects that embody his ideas. On opening night, the Mezcaleria will be activated with the live bottling of 100 limited-edition Coca-Cola bottles, each hand-customized by Sachs in homage to Joseph Beuys. As with all his work, the gesture collapses art and life, performance and production, into a single, ritual act.

Photo: Tom Sachs, Spirits of the Dead Return, 2025. English porcelain, ConEd barrier, plywood, extruded polystyrene, steel, plastic, and hardware. 27.9 x 30.5 x 13.3 cm (11 x 12 x 5.25 in), © Tom Sachs, Courtesy the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery

Info: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Ely House, 37 Dover Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 14/10-20/12/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://ropac.net/