Tom Sachs
Heidi, 2018
Mixed media
88 1/2h x 31 1/2w x 20d in
© Tom Sachs Image Credit Genevieve Hanson Image Courtesy Tom Sachs Studio and Vito Schnabel Gallery
Why the artist has been infatuated, as his latest show testifies, with Switzerland.
For a brief window last October, as Brexit recriminations puddled into flop sweat and the global migrant crisis reached a desperate pitch, a golden ticket could be had: Tom Sachs’s Swiss Passport Office, which took up residence in Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac for 24 hours, was ostensibly a performance piece, meant to prod at the arbitrary nature of land borders and the transactional economy of global migration, and the way travel documents can take on the sheen of luxury goods, and forged copies the dun of bootleg Chanel bought on Canal Street. His new exhibition, The Pack, which opened in Vito Schnabel’s St. Moritz gallery a few days after Christmas, wades a bit deeper into the Zugersee.