Arman

Accumulations and dissection of object is what Arman is most well known for. The body of work (that which is photographed on his website) is evidence of the his vision to accumulate, organise and assemble objects.

Title The Spirit of Yamaha
Date 1997
Description
Sliced actual piano with two complete motorcycle
Source www.arman.com

'Sculptor and painter whose best works and ideas kept the ability to surprise and delight for more than half a century.

THE artist Arman was associated in the public mind with his trademark handling of his materials: objects would be excitingly destroyed and then presented, often repetitively, stuck on board or canvas or reassembled in some striking fashion.

But Arman was no one-trick pony. If some of his pieces could seem formulaic, the work he produced in a career lasting nearly 60 years sustained a real ability to surprise and delight. And some of it was truly iconic, like the famous Long Term Parking, a towering monument made of scrapyard cars set in concrete. Or the Martyrs' Monument in Beirut, which applied the same treatment to tanks. Or even, more modestly, the towers of old clocks and suitcases that greet travellers outside St Lazare station, Paris. Arman was a maker of sardonic or gleeful totems, and, like the Pop artists with whom he was so often associated, very much a product of the postwar boom years.

...

By the mid-1960s Arman was hot artistic property. He experimented with more spectacular ways of treating objects, smashing them for his Coleres (rages), sawing them into slices for his Coupes (cuts) or, as Klein had done, by going at the canvas with a blowtorch and setting the result in resin (Combustions). These works were taut with the tension between the semi-vandalistic violence that produced them and the strangely pleasing result, between the intense energy of the process and the final repose. There was also a kind of melancholy, too, associated with the discarded and exhausted.'

Date October 27, 2005, Thursday
Source The Times (London)

Title Hope for Peace
Location Beirut, Lebanon
Date 1976
Description
Army tanks and armoured vehicles ambedded in concrete. 30 m - 4000 tonnes. Beyrouth, district of Yarzé, Lebanon.
Five thousand tons of concrete, 30 meters high, clasped around 78 tanks, jeeps and various artillery parts : this was Arman's very last monumental sculpture, erected in Beirut, in front of the Ministry of Defence. It is a works which strongly denounces the follies of man, with its defiantly ironic title "Hope for Peace". By its size, its cut, its harmonious appearance, it is a remarkable reflection of the image of a city which had long been reduced to the vision of buildings in ruins...
Source www.armanstudio.com