NEW YORK—One of the brightest, most entertaining, and most voraciously inquisitive artists on the contemporary scene is American Tom Sachs. Ever since he made his infamous Chanel- and Nike-clad Hello Kitty Nativity for the windows of Barney’s New York in 1994, Sachs has been best known for his fascination with the brands of contemporary commerce [his current show at Sperone Westwater includes an homage to his favorite craft knife — Quality (2008)]. He is also recognized for sculptures that are enormously ambitious in their range and scale — he reenacted a lunar landing at Gagosian Los Angeles last fall — but which make all too obvious how they were created. Everything in Sachs’s art is do-it-yourself, or, to borrow the title of the show he curated in 2000, “American Bricolage.” The glue-gun drip is probably as close as he comes to having to a signature brushstroke.

Sachs’s imagery and references seem almost boundless — in talking about his work he’ll refer as casually to Manet as to the Dead Kennedys, and within the space of a few words — and as a consequence, his content is often taken to be simply iconoclastic. But his comments make obvious that while virtually anything can find its way into his art, Sachs is pursuing meanings that are more permanent than those offered up by contemporary culture.

We’ll be seeing plenty of Sachs in New York City this summer. His splendid show “Animals” is at Sperone Westwater until June 21, and his “Bronze Collection,” which features sculptures of Hello Kitty, skateboard ramps, and towers of car batteries, will be at Lever House through September 6.

Sachs spoke to ARTINFO while putting the finishing touches on his show at Sperone Westwater, where he has converted their huge main gallery into a network of small interconnecting rooms.

Tom, why did you build these small rooms for your sculptures?

Well, I liked the small spaces here, and I hated the big space with the columns, because as a sculptor, how can you compete with a column that’s holding up the building? You can’t. Your art’s not as important as that. So the four extra rooms in the middle gallery were to annihilate those columns. And I think we did it really well, because they’re nice small galleries.

I’m intrigued, though, because your reputation is for leaving the evidence of your working process, but these walls look “real,” as if they’ve always been here.

Right. Our original idea was to make the walls out of foam core, so that you would see the process more, but we just didn’t have time. We only had a week for the installation after the last exhibition, and to do it the conventional way was stronger and quicker and cheaper.

But in the time that the walls were being built, I began to see that this is a bump up in quality from any previous show I’ve done. I’ve brought a whole new level of seriousness to the production end. I could never have afforded to do this kind of work 10 years ago; I started as a contractor. But as the economics of my art have shifted, I’ve tried to put some of that back into the work. Now I can spend months on a piece, and the economics support it. Of course I also used to make everything myself, and now I can’t do that. But I’ve been working with some of these people for 10 years, so it’s interchangeable who does what.

Tell me about these foam core pictures, the ones with the classical titles like Achilles (2007) and Sisyphus (2007).

What happened here was that the bronzes [at Lever House] are bronze casts of foam core sculptures of Hello Kitty. We made a couple of models that didn’t work out, and we smashed the molds before we cast them. This resulted in a huge [financial] loss, so, “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade” (that’s Dale Carnegie). These are all reconstituted panels of a smashed-out, flattened Hello Kitty. In Achilles, you can see her tail and her back skin filleted à la Silence of the Lambs, and in Sisyphus, you can see her face and her bow.