Acquavella Galleries presents 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. 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.
The exhibition is accompanied by a hardcover book published by Rizzoli and includes essays by Thomas Crow and Daniel Pinchbeck.
On View October 7 — November 26, 2022
Opening Reception: October 6, 6:00 – 8:00pm
