Arman

"ARMAN", ARMAND PIERRE FERNANDEZ (Nice, 1928 - New York, 2005).
"Violin découpé".
Bronze and wood.
Exemplary 7/8.
Signed and justified.
Measurements: 63 x 45 x 12 cm.

Arman's violins découpés are sculptures made from real violins cut, fragmented and recombined, one of the artist's most emblematic series within the Nouveau Réalisme. Arman transforms the musical instrument by means of longitudinal or transversal sections that he then reorganizes into sculptural compositions of great visual force, preserving the recognizable identity of the violin but taking it towards an aesthetic of destruction and poetic reconstruction. These works, developed especially since the 1960s, belong to his Coupes and Colères series, where the act of cutting, dismantling or even destroying everyday objects becomes an artistic gesture.

Considered one of the most outstanding exponents of New Realism, a movement whose production focused on everyday objects and which signified the rebirth of the artistic language of the 1960s, Arman went down in the annals of art as the creator of "Accumulations" and "Encapsulations". As the name suggests, the technique consisted of the accumulation or encapsulation of objects as a critique of the consumer society, of buying for the sake of buying and of using and throwing away. These installations of the same object - cameras, cars, doorknobs, faucets, gas masks or dollar bills as in this case - saturate the space until it becomes asphyxiating and question the place of the object in the society of consumption and industrial diffusion. Armand Pierre Fernandez, better known as Arman, was an antique dealer and amateur painter, as well as a musician: he played the cello. He settled in Nice, where Arman was born and studied at the city's School of Decorative Arts. There he met the painter Yves Klein, representative of abstraction and performance, as well as Mimmo Rotella or Christo, with whom he founded the New Realism group, which confronted the consumer society and industrial expansion by reaffirming humanistic ideals. He would later be trained at the Louvre School, where he would remain in contact with artistic modernity. His great contribution to painting and graphic work is what is defined as "Accumulations", groupings of objects of the same type dislocated from their natural location and presented as a group that constitute a critique of consumer society. Having become one of the most important living French artists of the moment, Arman's work is present in the streets of several cities - in Beirut he piled up tons of battle tanks in the Martyrs' Square; in Paris dozens of clocks in front of a train station; in Roanne hundreds of forks in front of a prestigious restaurant-, decorates the interior of hotels and stores and his actions -filling an art gallery with garbage, destroying with axes the furniture of a bourgeois interior or systematically sawing violins or saxophones- have been reproduced in the press and on television. At the last contemporary art fair in Paris, a 1963 work of his -Birth Control, an accumulation of dolls inside a suitcase- sold for 250,000 euros. He is currently represented at the Reina Sofia Museum, the MET in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Pompidou in Paris and the Walker Art Center.