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Arman

Untitled (Vénus aux pinceaux)

1998

Bronze statue and brushes, brown, white, green, yellow and blue patina

140 × 68 × 46 cm

Ed. 4/4 + 2 EA

Location: Grimaud, France

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55,000 € 55000.0 EUR 55,000 €

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About the artwork

This elegant sculpture is a new version of Bertel Thorvaldsen's 19th-century Venus with Apple, now in the Musée du Louvre. Arman has created a new version, drawing on the history of Western sculpture from the Parthenon to the present day. Here, the goddess is transformed into a hedgehog whose spikes are formed by brushes tracing dozens of colored lines on her skin. Arman shows us a work in progress, frozen in the midst of creation, confronting the two great practices of art history: sculpture and painting. This confrontation is certainly a reference to the artist's life, considered as a sculptor but all his life torn between painting and sculpture.

Expert opinion

This large-format sculpture is representative of Arman's work of the 1990s, his last creative period. Moving away from accumulations of objects and scraps, he devoted himself to large-scale bronze sculptures, reintegrating the human figure by drawing on the repertoire of classical sculpture.

About the artist

Arman Fernandez, known as Arman, French-American artist born in Nice in 1928, died in New York in 2005. A key figure on the contemporary French art scene and founding member of the Nouveau Réalisme movement, Arman uses the object as the basis for a renewed aesthetic. Famous for his "accumulations" that pile up various manufactured and trivial objects, his work questions consumer society and makes everyday life the infinite reservoir of his compositions. Like an archaeologist, Arman collects and preserves all manner of fetish objects that paint a portrait of our contemporary society. His works can be found in the collections of the greatest museums of modern and contemporary art, including the Centre Pompidou and MoMA.

“I assert that the expression of detritus, of objects, possesses its own value, directly, without any desire for aesthetic arrangement that obliterates them and makes them similar to the colors of a palette; furthermore, I introduce the sense of global gesture without remorse or remission.”

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