Arman

"ARMAN", ARMAND PIERRE FERNANDEZ (Nice, 1928 - New York, 2005).
"Liberté", 1990.
Multiple, copy E.A. 8 of 25.
Signed and justified by hand.
Size: 17.5 x 53 x 70 cm.
Considered as 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 throwing away. These installations of the same object - cameras, cars, doorknobs, taps, gas masks or dollar notes, as in this case - saturate the space to the point of suffocation and question the place of the object in the society of consumption and industrial diffusion. Armand Pierre Fernández, 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, a representative of abstraction and performance, as well as Mimmo Rotella and Christo, with whom he founded the New Realism group, which confronted the consumer society and industrial expansion by reaffirming humanistic ideals. He later trained at the Ecole du Louvre, where he remained 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 removed from their natural location and presented as a group that constitute a critique of consumer society. Now one of the most important living French artists of the moment, Arman's work is present in the streets of various cities - in Beirut he piled up tons of tanks in the Place des Martyrs, in Paris dozens of clocks in front of a train station, in Roanne hundreds of clocks in front of a train station, in Roanne hundreds of clocks in front of a train station, and in Paris dozens of clocks in front of a train station; In Roanne, hundreds of forks in front of a prestigious restaurant. He decorates the interiors of hotels and shops, and his actions - filling an art gallery with rubbish, hacking up the furniture of a bourgeois interior, systematically sawing violins and 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 Museo Reina Sofía, the MET in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Pompidou in Paris and the Walker Art Center.