This sale benefits scholarships at Anderson Ranch Arts Center

Tom Sachs (b. 1966)

There is No Try (Blue)

Signed, numbered and dated in pencil 'Tom Sachs 2020', lower right

Silkscreen with synthetic polymer ink on Coventry Rag paper

38 x 48 inches (96.5 x 121.9 cm)

Executed in 2020.

Edition 11/30 + 10 artist proofs

The work is sold unframed

Provenance:

Tom Sachs Studio, New York

NOTES:

Tom Sachs is an internationally acclaimed artist. His four-decades of bricolage sculptures invite viewers to participate in rigorously crafted and obsessively researched worlds, from Nutsy’s (2001), a dynamic remote control car race around icons of modernist art and architecture fashioned from foam core to Space Programs 1 through 5 (2007-2025), a series of immersive missions throughout the solar system, each comprised of dozens of multimedia works whose materials range from plywood to steel to porcelain and beyond. 

Throughout his artistic practice, Sachs challenges perceived hierarchies of materials and objects, treating each of his pieces, and what they’re made from, with equal amounts of curiosity, reverence and devotion. “To me, there’s no difference in value between a Picasso and a toilet plunger,” says Sachs. “I’ve explored both ideas in my work because I want to understand the process of making the things with which I have the deepest and most authentic connections, whether it’s art, everyday objects or spaceships.”

In There is No Try, Tom Sachs pays tribute to Andy Warhol, Star Wars, and the process of printmaking. Each print centers on Sachs’s favorite Hasbro Yoda action figure from The Phantom Menace—a balding, aggressive, middle-aged version of the Jedi Master seated in his council chair, which Sachs calls “the only Yoda that matters.”

Shot obsessively on an iPhone “like all real photographers use,” the composition mirrors Warhol’s portrait methodology—except here the subject is not a socialite, but a utopian icon. Sachs collaborated with Elizabeth Ferrill and master printer Brian Shure at Anderson Ranch to produce this print using 27 hand-drawn screens and four-color layers, with real diamond dust embedded in select variants—a nod to Warhol’s original technique. Proceeds benefit Anderson Ranch Arts Center, supporting artist residencies and scholarships.

For more than 35 years, Sachs’s work has been featured in many exhibitions around the world and is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo. Major solo exhibitions of Sachs’s work have been on view at Art Sonje Center (2022); Hybe Insight (2022); Deichtorhallen Hamburg Hall for Contemporary Art (2021); Schauwerk Sindelfingen (2020); Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (2019); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2017); Nasher Sculpture Center (2017); Sogetsu Kaikan (2016); Brooklyn Museum (2016); The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum (2016); The Contemporary Austin (2015); Park Avenue Armory (2012); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2009); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2006); Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2003); and SITE SANTA FE (1990).

Sachs lives and works in New York, where he leads his studio team in a multi-disciplinary art practice across sculpture, painting, ceramics, industrial and graphic design, and movie making. 

STATEMENT:

“Elizabeth Ferrill, the director of painting and printmaking at Anderson Ranch, bullied me into doing this print. I never liked doing prints. I felt like they were always too robotic. But then she showed me in depth how to make it beautiful. 

We followed the method that Andy Warhol did. When Warhol made his prints of real people, he would obsessively take portraits of them to find their best angles. I didn't want to make a print of a person I know. I wanted to make a print of someone better than everyone I know, a true utopian.

I took my favorite Hasbro Yoda action figure from Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace. It’s the only Yoda that matters. It was $7 on eBay. It’s the best Yoda. He's balding, middle aged, super aggressive, and a pugilist like me. He comes seated in a Jedi Council chair.

I placed Yoda in the right light and started moving around him shooting, looking for just the right angle. I used the camera all real photographers use, an iPhone. I obsessed over the photo and worked on it for a week until I got the perfect one.

Then Liz and I worked on the print along with her husband, Brian Shure, who is the master print maker at Anderson Ranch. We made 27 discrete silk screens and printed in four colors. We pulled pigment across the screens, one by one, while adding real diamond dust, the same kind Warhol used in his paintings.

There’s a hand-made uniqueness to each print and for people who frame them, some of the diamond dust will fall to the bottom in a singular, sculptural pile.

I always love going to Anderson Ranch and it’s a privilege to help raise money with these prints for such an important artist’s residency and its scholarships.”