Excerpt from The Art Newspaper "Three Exhibitions to See"
By Wallace Ludel
Tom Sachs: Handmade Paintings
Until 18 December at Acquavella Galleries, 18 East 79th Street, Manhattan
Aquavella Galleries presents Tom Sachs’s first ever exhibition to focus exclusively on paintings, and though not his trademark medium, the canvases feel largely in-step with his larger body of work. Their draftsmanship recalls a similar touch of the DIY aesthete, and the questions they pose—conundrums around consumerism, humour, and the tragicomic fallibility of the ego—are ones that undergird the artist's oeuvre. The paintings’ central focus is brands and logos, which collectively run the gamut from the mundane—a haphazard depiction of the McDonald’s golden arches—to the absurd—a bowl of Krusty the Clown’s Krusty-O’s cereal (from The Simpsons), replete with screws, worms, and dirt—to the mundanely absurd, or perhaps the absurdly mundane—the American flag. Cleverly, the paintings at once elevate and diminish their subjects, intentionally drudging it all into the realm of bathos. As Krusty the Clown often said, “It’s not just good, it’s good enough!”
