Ascaso Gallery is pleased to present the first solo show in Miami of Arman, one of the most innovative artists of the 20th century and a co-founder and member of the Nouveau Realisme movement. In association with the Arman Marital Trust, the Arman Conceptual Perception exhibition will take place from December 3 through February 26.

Arman’s prominence in the history of late modern and contemporary art is renowned; and his drive to consider and reconsider the correlation between objects and pictorial representations of them has proven to be a rich field of creative action, which he ceaselessly mined. By means of deconstructive and re-constructive methods, he created works where the interplays and tensions between the materiality of object and “the emotional substance of interior realityi have yielded an expressive visual language, a teasing-out and filling-in of breaches between sculptural and painterly practices. His background in painting and his expertise in the study, analysis and collection of objects align these pathways in works that are distinctly Arman’s. Early on, he articulated his methods in terms of a logical progression using processes such as stamping and imprinting surfaces, slicing through works associated with sculptural forms and music, and re-configuring them to reveal subjective essences through material arrangements. With the artist’s accumulations of things, the impact of a single object is amplified, while the destruction of a single object such as a musical instrument conveys pathos imbued with the memory of sound reconceptualized in a pictorial arrangement. With this physical transformation of the recognized, the already-seen, he proposes that new relationships can emerge in new material realizations, a reconnaissance; an acknowledgement of the things -- both rare and mundane -- that exist along with us and with which we interact in a myriad of ways. Arman maintained: “It is the response you get from seeing all those objects together, the shape, the size, the color...that is important to me. The first goal is the visual experience...” - Rosemary O’neill