Purple Book

People: The Tom Sachs Purple Book is Tom Sachs's contribution to the Purple Books series, Purple Book #21, issued as a special edition annex to Purple Fashion magazine's Fall/Winter 2014/2015 issue, #22.

The stapled softcover runs to roughly 84 pages, chiefly color illustrations, in the 28 cm format Purple Institute used across the series. Like other entries in the line, it functions as a standalone artist project produced and distributed alongside a numbered magazine issue rather than sold as a conventional monograph. Olivier Zahm was involved as Purple's editor.

Sachs (b. 1966) is a New York-based sculptor known for handmade, visibly imperfect replicas of consumer and technological objects — McDonald's-branded knives, plywood NASA space capsules, Chanel guillotines — built through his signature "bricolage" method of exposed screws, hand lettering and improvised materials that puts the labor of making on display. He trained at Bennington College and the Architectural Association in London, worked in Frank Gehry's furniture shop in the late 1980s, and gained early notice for a subversive 1994 Barneys New York Christmas display substituting Hello Kitty and Bart Simpson for the traditional nativity figures.