Tom Sachs: Miffy Fountain and My Melody

Two large-scale sculptures by internationally renowned contemporary visual artist Tom Sachs are on view outside the main entrance of the Westin Snowmass Resort. Sachs’s Miffy Fountain and My Melody (both 2008) represent his take on iconic fictional cartoon characters—“Miffy,” created by Dutch artist Dick Bruna, and “My Melody” by Japanese company Sanrio—and both are painted cast bronzes, with Miffy Fountain functioning as an outdoor fountain.

Honored with the Aspen Award for Art at ArtCrush in 2012, Tom Sachs is a sculptor, installation artist, and painter whose practice calls special attention to the way commodities can be reexamined and recontextualized through their representation as art objects. First modeled from small, mass-produced toy prototypes of each of the characters, the works on view were created in part to comment on, as Sachs relates, “this merchandising icon that exists only as a licensed character.” By rendering these characters “in a ‘fine’ material like bronze,” he adds, “it’s re-contextualizing and shifting it back to a high level.”