Arman was born in Nice in New York in 2005. This retrospective offers a survey of his entire career through more than a hundred work Arman studied at the Ecole des Art Décoratifs in Nice and then at the ecole du LOuvre in Paris. He began as a painter, influenced by the abstraction then dominant in France, but rapidy turned to a form of art distinctively attuned to his own age, making use the manufactured society. With Yves Klein and Martial Raysse, he was one of the Niçois contingent of the Nouveaux Réalistes Movenment that crytallized around art critic Pierre Restany in 1960. Using rubbish, scrap and other materials, Arman made Poubelles (Trash Cans), Accumulations, Coupes (Sliced Objects), des Colères (Tantrum), Combustion Inclusion ect. reflections on mass production and invasion of environnement by garbage, but equally meditations upon time.
The idéa for Arman's first accumulation came to him in a flash as he was looking at box of valves he had collected. Boxes, pigeonholes, compartments, drawers, and the squares of the chequerboard or the game of Go (The artist being of keen player of this last were key elements not only of this artistic language but also of his personal relationship with the word. The exhibition has thus been designed on the basis of a grid visible on the floor, a materialisation of "Armanian territory" divided into seven thematic sections.
The major installations Conscious Vandalism an Day After illustrate the later development of procedures adpopted by the artist early in his career, while archive images and film document his major public actions.
1 - From the informal to the object
In 1950s Arman developed a non figurative-manner. I painting influenced by Serge Poliakoff and NIclas de Steal. After discovering the work of Hendick Nicolaas Wekmar seeing a number of painting by Jackson Pollock, and visiting the Kurt Schwitters exhibition at the Berggruen gallery in spring 1954, he have gaveup the brush for rubber stamp, imprinting the surface of paper or canvas with unpremeditated gestures and rapidly coming to adopt large formats and all-over composition. He then got to know the members of the groupe de recherches Musicales led by Pierre Schaeffer. Who had just invented ways of strechingout slowing down sounds, calling the result "Allure d'objets en musiques". Arman thus embarked on his own work on "gail" of objetcs, and not long after produced his "Colères" (Tantrums) in which the broken remains of a smashed objet were affixed to the canvas. the first time the object entered the space of the painting in 1959-60, Aramn collaborated with Jacques Brissot, a members of the GRM, to make the film Objets animés (Animated objects), based on this Allures Works but also featuring images of parts of the body and other elements from nature, skilfully cut together.
2 - The Poublelles and le Plein
Towards the end of 1959, Arman made his first, experimental Poubelle or Garbage tipping the contents of a household waste-bin into a glass box, making a number more on the same principale over the next three years. A few months later, he embarked on his series of Portraits-Robot (Profile Picture) assembling in a box articles provided by the subject . Such a protrait was no rebus or puzze, but rather an attempt to express the very essence of the person concerned. Then, i, 1960, after his friend Yves Klein's "le vide" at Iris Cler's Arman staged " the "plein" at tje same gallery filing it to the brim with rubbish and junk.
In the early 1970s, Arman discovered the technique of casting very fast-setting polymer allowing him him to embed objects on a considerably large scale. He returned to the trash Can series, this time incorporating all the garbage, enven the organic wasle. In 1972, he suggested to jean-Pierre Mirouze the idéea for Sanitation a film on the collection and handing of the garbage produced each day by the city of New York.
3 - The Critical mass of object
Arman recalled how the idea came to him for his first Accumulation, looking at the boxes of objects he had collected: "The deepest help radio valves, goden, silver, some of them black. It was full to the top. I looked at it, and I had a kind of impulse. I found a sheet of acetate, cut it to the size of the box and - bam ! bam ! bam ! - I nailed it to the edge of the box. Then I took a brush and black painted the sides of the box and about a centimetre ofacetate. I stood up straight, and there was ma first "Accumulation".
An Accumulation is a repetition in large numbers of of an object of the same type : It highlights the principle of mass production of identical objects, but also the singularity of each one, even in its similarity to the others.
Arman Thus registers industrial mass production as a new reality. The Accumulation also represents the artistic expression of a passion for collecting that the artist shared with the family of his birth.
In Accumulation naturelles, Nice 1960 a film by jean-pierre Mirouze, Arman is seen visiting garbage tips and junkyards outside Nice, in search of his favourite material : scrap.
4 - Colère and coupes
In 1961, Arman produced a first colère (Tantrum) in public, destroying Henry II style reproduction fuurniture 'Utitled, 1961). A second, NBC Rage (1961), was produced in front of NBC television news cameras. In earch case, the artist gesture was borrowed from the martial artist that he practiced and calculed to preserve in partthe indentity of the object. From 1963, Arman would conceoive spectacular Colères involving explosives . Later, on 5 April 1975, Arman carried out the action Conscious Vandalism, trashing a middle class apartment installed in the gallery space. Both vioentand sublime, the resulting environnement of broken objetcs effectes a poetic catharsis. The artist gesture itself is ambiguous, partially destroying the object and the same time perpetuating it in a new form.
With the coupe or slicing technique developed in 1961, Arman sought tograsp the internal structure of objet, which he de-structures in order to reorder its external appearance, so transforming te object - often effecting an anmorphosis in three dimensions - while alson establishing links with earlier movements, such as Cubism, constructivism, and the futurism of Boccioni and Carrà.
Jacques Brissot's Colère, 1976-2010, showw Arman making Coupes ans Colères of musical instruments.
5 - Archealogy of the Future
the use of such materials as resin and cement would allow Arman toprojectworks made from debris of various kinds. The embedding of objects in matter evokes fossils and archaelogical sites. the transparency of the resin suggests a Pompeian allegory. While the greyish blue tone of Emersions hints at contemporary ecologial disasters. Produced in parallel with there works, the combustion amso explore the sublime will to destruction. the fragility of the object captured at the moment of its perishingengages an aesthetics of ruin, invoking our relationship to time and is powerful philosophical implications. Arman thus produced in 1985 the monumental the Day After, a combustion of a whole room of furniture in the Louis XV style, cast in bronze in ecole de Nice, filmmaker Gerard Patris sets Arman's first Combustion of a piano in the contest of 1960s
6 - Arman, Renault and Industry
Collaborating with Renault, Arman was able to make works using that iconic product, the automobile. Confronted by a system of industrial production, he no longer worked with a finished object but with its elements, the parts that when assembled together go to make up a particulaly complex structure; the work with parts also accords with his long standing interest in the serial and repetitive. the result is a masterly renewal of the artistic language that has its origins in the accumulations. the works of this period the large sculptures in particular, revisiti the problem of formalism so crucial to contempory sculpture.
In carlos Vilardebo's TV documentary Accumulation d'Arman, 1969, the artist explains his approach; "at the beginning it was just a matter of making a 'peace' but other appetites were stimulated. I don't think I will work in the same way after this experience."
7 - I am a born again Painter
In 1966, Aramn made objects of paint and painting, embedding them in resin.
Twentyyears later, he would show off his genius for paint in the impressive works that marked his return to the gestural, collecting and then stamping upton a large number of tubes of paint. arman's Shooting proposes an alternative Pollock's drip-painting with another way of getting the paint onto the canvas. It Should be recalled that Aramn always kept in mind the pictorial aspect of his work, rarely straying far from the idea of the work as surface, and consistently engaging with all-over-technique and repetitive gesture of Jackson Pollock. Vincent Van Gogh remained a key reference throughout Arman's career ; the artist paid tribute to him in 1994 with his own versions of starry Night.
Filmed in Arman's studio in Vence between 1990 and 1991, jean Ferrero's Shooting painting document this period in the artist's work.
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