Tom Sachs: The Good Shelf

14 Oct-20 Dec 2025

Overview

Thaddaeus Ropac London presents A Good Shelf, an exhibition and interactive installation by Tom Sachs that marries his signature bricolage sculpture techniques with the ceramic practice he began in 2012. A selection of 30 of the New York-based artist’s hand-formed ceramics, displayed on singular shelves built from found materials, will be accompanied by Mezcaleria, a working coffee and mezcal bar, as Sachs continues to explore themes of ritual and process.

The ceramics on view can be used as mezcal copitas or cortado cups, cereal or soup bowls, but their ancient, versatile form originates from the East Asian tea bowl, or chawan. Sachs first started sculpting NASA-logo chawans after his 2012 Space Program: Mars mission, when he created a bricolage version of the traditional Japanese tea ceremony to be conducted on Mars. Over the course of more than a decade, Sachs has continued and deepened his study of ceramics. 

Sachs is drawn to the Japanese tea ceremony for the same reason he is drawn to space travel – and the same reason people do anything at all – a desire for spirituality, sensuality and stuff. ‘Spirituality,’ Sachs says, ‘is about pursuing the big existential questions. Where do we come from? Are we alone? Sensuality is about going where no man has gone before: exploring space, the exhilaration of g-force, the awe of the cathedral, the feel of the kimono, the taste of matcha. Stuff is the hardware: a spaceship, a tea bowl, a chair. Our priority is sculpture. But sculpture doesn’t mean shit without that trinity and without its rituals.’ The tea bowl itself is emblematic of Sachs’s ongoing existential and material investigations. Throughout his career, Sachs has employed his characteristic bricolage approach to reverse the modernist drive towards ever-sleeker objects. In A Good Shelf, he brings his pragmatic tenderness towards scraps too good to be thrown away together with the meditative tactility of ceramics, treating the two media as profoundly equal. Governed by ritual, guided by the cerebral systems of Conceptual art and generated by our very human desire for the comforts of stuff, in this new body of work, Sachs once again finds a novel way to champion the aesthetics of imperfection, recycling and repair.

To premiere along with A Good Shelf, Sachs has built Mezcaleria, a working coffee and mezcal station, open to the public at Thaddaeus Ropac London. Art installation and bar, the sculpture expands upon the ideas of the exhibition, inviting visitors to consider and participate in the everyday rituals we all partake in.