Arman

Armand Pierre Fernandez (1928-2005) was born in Nice, France and studied at the École du Louvre in Paris. Initially an abstract painter, Arman was most successful with his found object sculptures (poubelles) comprised of everyday objects and trash. In 1959, he began to display trash in plexiglass vitrines in critiques of consumerism, waste, and mass production. Along with artists Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, critic Pierre Restany, and others, he helped found the movement of Nouveau Réalisme, a group Restany described as invested in "a poetic recycling of urban, industrial and advertising reality." Arman's works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery in London, and the Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain in Nice, among others.