ARMAN | UNTITLED

Allan Stone Gallery, New York

New York, Allan Stone Projects, Arman and César, March - June 2015

Arman was a founding member of the Nouveau Réalisme movement that emerged in France in the 1960s in response to Pop Art, and he established himself with found object sculptures preoccupied with the consequences of mass consumption, called Accumulations. In these works, the quantities of objects and their repetition induce a sense of anarchy and instability, which highlights the dichotomous nature of rising prosperity and ease-of-life, against a backdrop of competing ideologies and nationalistic rivalries. Dense cumulative assemblage is a central theme that runs throughout the Allan Stone Collection, ranging from Arman and other contemporary artists to Folk Art memory vessels and African Congo nail fetishes. During a career that spanned five decades, Arman had over 600 solo-exhibitions, including retrospectives at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in 1991 and at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, in 1998. His work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, the Tate Modern, London, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others.