Arman

In fact it was in the second half of the 1950s, after his encounter with Klein and Pascal, that he embraced abstractionism, started working on the obsessive replication of stamps and then moved on to Allures’ traces. Arman’s career changed its course in the 1960s. In the wake of the Noveau Réalisme poetics, he started taking possession of urban objects, using them as artistic material: he took them, broke and even destroyed them, recoloured and assembled them into sculptures with a dramatic tone. His artistic work was affirmed in the sign of accumulation.

The objects of use that the industrial society uses daily but consider marginal and insignificant, in his works shone in a second life, illuminated by the mastery of the artist. In the early sixties  Arman continued his work under the sign of Accumulations and the alteration of the material. Throughout the decade, his research continued making Coupes, cut, sawn and reassembled objects; Colères, destroyed or damaged objects; Combustions, where he exposed objects such as pianos, violins or armchairs to combustion and Inclusions: accumulation of objects immersed in transparent polyester or resin glass.

Towards the end of the decade, a prolific collaboration of art industrie began with the car manufacturer Renault. His accumulations included objects such as engines, fenders, and auto parts. The art industrie was resumed in 1999, also for Ferrari, on the centenary of the foundation of the car manufacturer. Arman, during the seventies, began to devote his art  to outdoor concrete accumulations, a practice that he also extended to monumental complexes for the following two decades.

One of the artist’s obsessions, throughout his long career, concerned the manipulation of musical instruments (violins, pianos, guitars, trumpets), both in sculpture and painting, so as to make it one of his main distinctive features.

Arman confirmed himself for fifty years as one of the most incisive artists of the twentieth century. His critique of our consumer society was carried out, taking to their most extreme, the tools of consumerism: the accumulation of objects and the destruction of the same.