Description
Armand Pierre Fernandez (1928 – 2005)
Arman
French artist, he studied at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Nice with his friend Yves Klein and then at the École du Louvre in Paris. His art puts him at the intersection between painting and sculpture, so that he called himself a “un peintre qui fait de la sculpture.” He is remembered as one of the greatest exponents of the New Realism, a movement that has often gathered the critical of mass culture. Within this poetics, Arman moves away from abstract painting and, between the Fifties and Sixties, experienced in the direction of provocative sculptural shapes, three-dimensional collages made for accumulation, compression, packing of items belonging to the consumerist society. Part of the Distructions were also the process like breaking tools and blow up cars, as symbolic practices that aimed to prevent the relentless capitalist production development. Among his most innovative works are also the Accumulations, sculptural forms characterized by the recurrence of a particular object in accordance with the principles of chromatic order and uniformity, and Inclusions, attempts to steal a particular item to the time through its contextualization. The works of Arman have known great success in Europe but also in the United States, where the artist has frequently spent some time.
