Description

The book, edited by Germano Celant, retraces Arman’s artistic journey (Nice, 1928 – New York, 2005), in a substantial excursus, in which personal events intertwine with history and the international art scene. From his debut in the early 1950s up to signing the Nouveau Réalisme manifesto in 1960 and moving to the United States, where he is influenced by New Dada and Pop Art – the chronology follows the artist’s entire life, organised in sections, delving deeply from the period of the first works to 1974.
The artist’s research centres around ordinary things and, as Celant notes, “The intensification of the existential virtualities of the object has led Arman to explore areas between the micro and the macro of urban living: from the stamp to the monument. He has mixed materials and products, units and series, singularity and heterogeneity, establishing order and disorder, managing to create the critical flow of reality.”
The narrative is enriched by a vast pictorial display: from the Accumulations of industrial and mass-produced objects; to the Poubelles that register the waste of consumer society; from the famous Colères, Coupes and Combustions, which through various processes dematerialise objects by depriving them of functionality; to painting, to actions and monumental works.