Arman

Arman, whose birth name was Armand Pierre Fernandez, was born in Nice on November 19, 1928. He is a Franco-American painter, sculptor and visual artist. Read biography

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Biography

Arman, born Armand Pierre Fernandez in Nice on November 19, 1928, is a Franco-American painter, sculptor and visual artist. Arman showed an early interest in art and painting, thanks to his father, a dealer in antique furniture. From 1946 onwards, he spent three years training as an artist at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Nice. His interest in Far Eastern art then led him to leave his hometown for Paris, where he studied at the École du Louvre. In 1950, he met Yves Klein and Claude Pascal, with whom he later formed the Triangle group. In the early '50s, his paintings were marked by the influence of Serge Poliakoff and Nicolas de Staël. 1954 was a turning point in Arman's work, the year he gradually abandoned painting in favor of other media. In 1955, he produced his first cachets, which form impressions on canvas that vary in shape and color. In 1960, Arman joined the New Realists movement, along with Yves Klein, Pierre Restany, Raymond Hains, Martial Raysse and Daniel Spoerri. The New Realists opposed the lyricism of abstract painting at the time, but did not wish to return to figuration. They advocated the use of objects taken from concrete, everyday reality - inspired by Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades. For Arman, this ambition was embodied as early as 1959 by an increasingly strong attachment to sculpture and the appearance of the first "accumulations", for which he is best known today. From 1960 onwards, these accumulations were produced in volume, and consisted of sculptures created from the recovery and accumulation of heterogeneous elements. They prompt viewers to question their relationship with objects and art in a consumer society that favors mass production. He was one of the first artists to use manufactured objects directly as pictorial material. His work has been commissioned in nearly a hundred cities around the world, and can still be seen today in public spaces. His concrete and iron sculptures include Musical accumulation,created in 1971 for the Parco Sempione in Milan, or La Rampante (1999), an accumulation of Ferraris in red bronze that can be found at the entrance to the Imola Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari circuit in Italy. In Paris in 1985, Arman created the bronze luggage accumulation Lifetime deposit and the accumulation of clocks Everyone's Hour in front of the Saint-Lazare train station. In 1989, Arman returned to painting with the series Shooting colorsThese are paintings that he creates on the floor by ejecting color from a tube and crushing it with his foot. In 1998, a major retrospective was held at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, giving the public a complete overview of his work, with works dating from 1959 to 1997. Until 2001, Arman's work was shown in Germany, Portugal, Israel, Brazil, Mexico, Taiwan, Spain... He died in New York on October 22, 2005.

Arman and printmaking

Arman's engraved and lithographed work occupies an important place in his artistic career. His preferred techniques are manifold: he produces illustrated books, serigraphs, etchings, lithographs and numerous posters. After experimenting with woodcuts as early as 1955, his experiments began in earnest in 1959, at the Patrick studio, where at the time Crow and Jean Dubuffet. In 1965, he began working in lithography at Pietro Sarto's studio in Switzerland. He then moved to New York and began silkscreening, with works inspired by Jim Dine and Jasper Johns. Mélodie Brosséean album of 3 original silkscreen prints produced in 1992, is a perfect example of this work based on the accumulation of lines and colors.