Armand Pierre Fernandez, known as Arman, born November 17, 1928 in Nice. Arman discovers art very early. His father, a second-hand goods dealer, art and music lover, introduced him to painting at the age of 10. In 1946, he studied at the Decorative Arts of Nice and continued his studies between 1949 and 1950 at the Ecole du Louvre. His first personal exhibition took place in 1956 at the Haut Pavé gallery in Paris. At the end of 1957, Arman signs his works with his first name in homage to Van Gogh but on the cover of a 1958 catalogue, following a typo, “Armand” becomes “Arman”, the name he keeps afterwards… In 1960, he is co-founder of the Nouveaux Réalistes group, which advocates the use of recycled materials and includes François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, Jacques Villeglé, César, Mimmo Rotella, Niki de Saint Phalle, Gerard Deschamps and Christo.

In 1959, Armand introduced rubbish into his works: His “Poubelles” are transparent boxes containing rubbish and portraits of his friends made from their own waste. He went one step further by filling the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris with rubbish: The exhibition is entitled “Le Vide et le Plein” (1960). In 1961, he began to make assemblages. His technique consists in breaking / destroying / burning / cutting off and then assembling on canvas everyday objects: chair, double bass, violin broken / shattered / cut into thin slices, etc… Entitled “Anger”. He accumulates and stacks worthless objects: Bottle caps, glass cans, pieces of transparent plastic, tubes of pills, gas masks, dollar bills, crucifixes, etc… In 1967, he started “art-industry” with the Renault firm by creating a sculpture made of a set of car parts frozen in concrete. In the eighties, he cut bronze sculptures into slices. He had gigantic urban tower-monuments erected in violins, clocks or cars (Long Term Parking, Jouy-en-Josas, 1982 or the Clocks of the Saint-Lazare train station in Paris). Arman thus took over the public spaces of nearly a hundred cities around the world by creating monumental works. At the beginning of the 1990s, he created “Collections” and presented installations of tabletops, coffee machines and various objects.

Unfortunately, the artist passed away in October 2005. His sculptures, paintings, etchings and lithographs are now in the largest collections and museums in the world.