Retrospective. Twenty years after his death, Arman exhibits at the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art

Organized by the National Museum Foundation (FNM), in collaboration with The Arman Marital Trust, this exhibition brings together 67 emblematic works by this pioneer of the New Realists movement and traces his creative journey from the 1950s to the 2000s. The event, in homage to the visionary talent of one of the most important artists of the 20th century, explores Arman’s plastic innovations through various themes such as “Accumulations”, “Cuts and Angers” and “Combustions”. The exhibition, entitled “Arman, the object of art”, marks the start of the celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of his disappearance and coincides with the ten years of existence of the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMVI) .

“Having a retrospective, 20 years after Arman’s disappearance, is extraordinary”, enthuses Mehdi Qotbi, president of the FNM, who recalls that the exhibition was produced thanks to the support of the artist’s wife, Corice Arman. The latter also donated a sculpture by the artist, “The Piano”, which will enrich the MMVI collection and which is already on display in front of the museum.

Arman, whose real name is Armand Pierre Fernandez, was born on November 17, 1928 in Nice, and died on October 22, 2005 in New York. At the beginning of the 1960s, he signed the New Realism manifesto with his fellow artists Yves Klein, Martial Raysse and Jean Tinguely. Later joined by César and Christo, the movement seeks to bring ordinary life closer to art and offers reflections on the degradation of humanist values ​​due to industrialization and consumerism.

A first Moroccan exhibition by Arman, from 1971, in Casablanca

This is not the first time that Arman’s works have been shown in Morocco. “Arman exhibited his works in 1971 at the Venise Cadre gallery in Casablanca. He would be very proud to be back here, he who had collectors in Morocco. Moreover, most of the pieces exhibited come from New York, Paris, but also Casablanca. There is a large part of museum quality works that come from Moroccan collections», reveals Jérôme Neutres, curator of the exhibition. We will have understood, it was therefore the gallery owner Lucien Amiel, owner of this art space, who died in 2021, who was the first to show Arman’s works in our region.

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“Combustions: The Day After” is one of his widow’s favorite series. In an exchange with Le360, she thus tells how the artist managed to find a way to restore the beauty of cremated objects. “We were at a dinner in Paris, and Arman was complaining about not being able to make the burned objects aesthetically pleasing. Three weeks later we received a package in the mail. It was very heavy, very strange. When we opened it, we discovered a piece of wood. It came from a person who had a foundry, and who was present at the dinner that evening. He had listened to what Arman was saying and sort of showed him how he could make wood out of bronze. Thus was born this series, one of my favorites», remembers Corice Arman.

As other sculptors use clay or wood, Arman made manufactured objects the raw material for his art. And as the curator of the exhibition says so well, transmitting to new generations the history of this singular language, which has become universal, that constitutes Arman’s work is also a way of telling the history of contemporary art. .