A retrospective
The Centre Pompidou is to stage a retrospective devoted to Arman, one of the major
figures of post-War art. The exhibition will bring together almost 120 works from
leading museums and private collections to offer a new and distinctive take on
Arman’s work, from the second half of the 1950s to the last years of the 20th century.
A founder member of the Nouveaux Réalistes, a group that championed “new perceptual
approaches to the real,” Arman developed a body of work intimately related to its own
age, taking as its artistic material the manufactured products of the consumer society.
In a presentation both lively and educational, the exhibition will highlight the two
fundamental features of Arman’s work: the gesture, inherited from the practice of
the martial arts, (through an exceptional selection of filmed records of the artist’s
actions), and the object as vector of new artistic forms. The presentation is organised
around seven themes that reflect Arman’s major artistic problematics, testifying
to the originality and the evident contemporary relevance of his work.
In 1957, while in close contact with the concrete music milieu, Arman began to use objects covered
in paint that left the trace of their passage across the canvas: these were the Allures d’objets,
the ‘Gait of Objects’ works. In the course of these researches the object gradually began to impose
itself within the pictorial frame, more particularly through the quantitative. From then on, the
artist made the object part of his process of creation, seeing it as a “plastic fact.” The notorious
Poubelles (Trashcans) thus present rubbish as an art material, locating Arman within a decisively
post-modern approach.
“I started as a painter ... I had a physical, practical need to physically touch the paint. I found this
system of capturing the paint as it comes from the tube, fixing it in Plexiglas or polyester resin –
To accompany the Arman exhibition, the Centre’s Children’s Gallery will offer an interactive
it becomes an object. Paint becomes object. I had lots of fun with that. I made monochrome works,
workshop for children of three years and upwards, organised around aspects of the artist’s work.
and others very colourful: I remade the painter.”
Object and gesture will serve as key themes, bringing together Arman’s artistic innovation with
the sensuous experience of the child. Absorbed in this “poetical and contemporary factory”
conceived by artist-designer Adrien Rovero, children will be able to explore together, through
their own senses, the distinctive techniques that Arman uses (the stamp, the transsection of
objects, the photofit), bringing a fresh eye to bear on the world around them.
This retrospective of more than 120 works, some of them of monumental scale, has been organized around
seven themes. Arman’s work cannot in fact be understood in terms of successive periods. For he frequently
returned to and revised the “procedures” of earlier times – accumulations, garbage cans, slicings, rages
and combustions – creating a living language that developed with every discovery or invention.
Image: Le Fauteuil d'Ulysse, 1965 © ADAGP Paris 2010, phot. Jean-Claude Planchet
Communication department director:
Françoise Pams telephone +33 (0)1 44 78 49 08 e mail francoise.pams@centrepompidou.fr
Press officer:
Céline Janvier 01 44 78 49 87 e-mail celine.janvier@centrepompidou.fr
Éditions du Centre Pompidou
presse contact: Évelyne Poret telephone 00 33 (0)1 44 78 15 98 e-mail evelyne.poret@centrepompidou.fr
Centre Pompidou
75191 Paris cedex 04
Hours:
11 am – 9 pm every day ex.Tuesday
Admission:
10 euros – 12 euros, depending on time
concessions: 8 euros – 9 euros
ticket valid the same day for the Musée National d’Art Moderne and all exhibitions
free for under-18s and members