Arman (1928–2005), born Armand Pierre Fernandez in Nice, was a French-born American artist and one of the founders of Nouveau Réalisme. In 1960 he filled a Paris gallery with rubbish in “Le Plein”, and in 1961 his work appeared in “The Art of Assemblage” at MoMA. He became known for his “Accumulations” of identical everyday objects, refuse sealed in transparent containers and endlessly repeated rubber-stamp prints.
Arman (1928–2005), born Armand Pierre Fernandez in Nice, France, was a French-born American artist and one of the founding figures of Nouveau Réalisme. The movement, formed in 1960 with the critic Pierre Restany as its theorist, sought a new, direct engagement with the everyday reality of objects. That same year Arman staged “Le Plein” at the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris, filling the gallery with rubbish as a counterpart to Yves Klein’s earlier “Le Vide”. He became known for his “Accumulations” of identical everyday objects, his “Poubelles” of refuse sealed in transparent containers and his repeated rubber-stamp “Cachets”. Restany described this approach as “the language of quantity”. His international breakthrough came in 1961 with “The Art of Assemblage” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and from that year he lived part of the time in New York. He became a United States citizen in 1973 and died in New York in 2005. Major retrospectives include those at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2011) and the Museum Tinguely in Basel. The screenprint “Boom-Boom” (1966), an artist’s proof printed by Chiron Press and published by Tanglewood Press, offered by TUMO Gallery, comes from the “New York International” portfolio; impressions of this print are held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
