Arman (Armand Pierre Fernandez)

This work is recorded in the Arman Studio Archives New York under number: APA# 8003.79.607.

Armand Pierre Fernandez, better known as Arman, was born in Nice in 1928. His father owned an antique shop, which is where Arman discovered his passion and fascination for soulful things at an early age. He entered the art school in Nice to study traditional art, but left after just three years, having found the course too conservative.
His early influences included contemporary artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock and Kurt Schwitters, in whose footsteps Arman followed by painting abstract motifs. However, it was not until around 1960, when he became involved in and formed the artist group “Nouveaux Réalistes” with, among others, César, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely and Yves Klein, that he found his niche and the expression which we have come to associate with him. He began experimenting with early versions of a recurring theme for him – “accumulations”, in which he explores his reality and gives new dimensions to what are already complete objects. An accumulation always features a number of repeated everyday objects, arranged together and covered with plexiglas. These works use repetition as a means of achieving abstraction; in much the same way as repeating the same words over and over gradually causes them to lose their meaning. Arman’s works do the same thing using identical coloured pencils or brushes, with the objects becoming abstract forms and losing their actual shape.
This work “Accumulation Crayons, 1982” comprises a quantity of grey and white Berol Verithin coloured pencils mounted in a plexiglas box. As this work was commissioned direct from the artist, the current owner was able to choose the colours of the pencils used.