The exhibition comprises both historic sculpture and new photography in a special presentation, the artist’s first with Sotheby’s. Moving Stills explores the Sachs’ enduring fascination with recontextualising everyday objects in a manner that is at once full of wit and deeply reflective. Taking the commonplace as his starting point – a chair, a sledge, a milk can, a walking stick, a spade, or a roll of toilet paper – Sachs imbues the inanimate with character and poetry.
In his sculpture, Sachs seeks to inject soul into lifeless objects that are traditionally disregarded. Separated from their original, practical function, they are given a new emotional dimension. Cast in bronze and resin, carved in wood or granite, perforated, or shot at a local shooting range, the artist highlights their importance and beauty.
Continuing this concept are Sachs’s Moving Stills, a new series of one-off large-scale photographs. These eery and uncanny representations of a triangle and a roll of Tenderly (toilet paper) are musings on and inversions of the time-honoured still life genre as, in this case, ‘moving’ has a dual meaning. Whilst encapsulating the artist’s empathetic and sensual approach to art the term also refers to the literal motion that he makes with his camera in the photography process, as he wields it like a paintbrush, freezing the movement with a single flash.
