Previous Next

ARMAN: LE PLEIN

Curated by Bernar Venet

French-American artist, born in 1928 in Nice and died in 2005 in New York.

Arman is internationally recognized as a major contributor to late 20th century art, and as a main protagonist of the French “Nouveau Réalisme” school, which was parallel to the American Pop Art movement of the 1960s. Arman’s work is represented in major museums, and in both public and private collections worldwide.

At the core of his artistic statement are his “Accumulations”, which use everyday objects as subjects, from useful, worn, or aggressive, the list of which is nearly inexhaustible: coffee makers, teapots, hammers, wrenches, keys, revolvers… Each accumulation brings together a large number of similar objects to create the work.

In 1960, Arman conceived the exhibition “Le Plein” (“The Full”) at Iris Clert Gallery in Paris, based on an architectonic principle similar to “Le Vide” (“The Void”), presented two years earlier in the same gallery by Yves Klein. Arman’s intention was to “emotionally conquer” space. This approach is conceptual and supra-material in nature, as it seeks to radically transform the visitor’s phenomenological and behavioral relationship to a space through material saturation, an answer to immaterial emptiness of his friend Yves Klein. “Le Plein” marks a radical evolution to the “readymade”, or to the surrealist paradigm of the found object, both through its architectural scale and its inherent quality, self-destruction entropic principle.