Arman
Les Poubelles des artistes
New York (1970-1973)
Leila Heller Gallery is pleased to present the work of the celebrated, late Franco-American artist Arman (né Arman Fernandez), in a discrete installation of five works entitled Les Poubelles des Artistes: New York (1970-1973) for Art Basel 2017, located at Booth C1.
The five works presented here—rarely before brought together in such an ambitious survey—represent one half of ten collaborations between the artist and his contemporaries in early 1970s New York, including Robert Rauschenberg, Sol LeWitt, Jim Dine, Bernar Venet, Joseph Kosuth, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Peter Hutchinson, and Christo, among others. These ‘poubelles’ highlight one of the artist’s more visionary archival responses to the Postwar and post-Fordist rise of not only conspicuous consumption, but also the resultant and remarkable mass material destruction. What Peter Schjeldahl called upon the occasion of their first exhibition at John Gibson Gallery in 1973, “tantalizing form[s] of self-portrait”, with the aid of history, each of these works can be seen as well as commentary on detritus and production in material, late-capitalist existence: archives as portraits, witnesses to an era.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Marrying the exigencies of Dadaist drives, a performative aesthetics of shock, and assemblage techniques, Arman (b France, 1928; d USA, 2005), is considered one of the leading figures of the French postwar Nouveaux Realistes—a group which also included Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely—whose work is marked by an aesthetic foregrounding of the ‘real’ in terms of the world of raw objects, materials, and physical processes. At the core of his artistic statement are his ‘Accumulations’ which employ the use of everyday objects as subjects.
Arman’s work is represented in the major museums and important public collections worldwide. These museums include the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City; Harvard University Art Museums; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Musee Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Musee d ́Art Moderne et d`Art Contemporain, Nice, France; the Tel-Aviv Museum, Israel; the Musee Picasso, Antibes, France; Tate Gallery, London; the Seibu Museum of Fine Arts, and the Hara Museum, Tokyo, Japan and the Haknoe Open Air Museum, Japan. His work was recently included in the 2015 Guggenheim exhibition ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s and he had a retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2010. Throughout his career, Arman has been awarded with art’s greatest honors such as the Grand Prix Marzotto Commandeur des Arts et Lettres, Officier del'Ordre National du Merite, and Grand Officier de la Legion d'Honneur.