Born 1980 I Lives and works in New York, USA
Daniel Arsham creates interdisciplinary art firmly situated in the world. As the artist himself states, “I make things I want to see exist in the world.” Arsham’s sculptures often resemble eroded artifacts or fragmented monuments, blurring the boundaries between art, architecture and design.
Arsham refers to his practice as “fictional archaeology,” creating pieces which appear to form part of our material history but are in fact visually incorporating visual references of the recent past or the present day. Arsham removes familiar objects, figures and symbols of popular culture from their original contexts and places them within a different temporal framework. Drawing on the narrative traditions of classical sculpture, Arsham creates figures that unexpectedly combine the iconography of the past with contemporary phenomena. In these reinterpreted images – such as a classical female bust whose head reveals robotic structures – he presents a tension between history and the present, as an image associated with the art historical canon comes to represent, for example, visions of a futuristic culture.
In his paintings and drawings, Arsham continues to explore this same temporal tension, combining subjects and visual references from the present with forms reminiscent of archaeological discoveries. Arsham’s works do not merely depict objects; rather, they construct imagined situations in which classical artefacts appear as newly integrated elements of our environment. In his landscapes, Greek statues are placed within urban and natural settings, where they appear simultaneously as remnants of the past and objects belonging to the present. His sculptural figures, meanwhile, incorporate architectural structures in which the human body and the built environment merge, forming hybrid entities that are difficult to situate within a specific historical period. The works thus function as forms of temporal transition, in which the past and the present do not appear as clearly distinct periods, but rather as overlapping and mutually defining layers.
Arsham graduated from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York, where he studied fine arts with a strong emphasis on architecture and engineering. Arsham has co-founded the exhibition space The House, and with Alex Mustonen, the design studio Snarkitecture, a practice that seeks to merge design, art and architecture by working within and transforming existing structures. Arsham has served as a stage designer for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and collaborated with brands such as Dior, Adidas, and Byredo. His works are included in the collections of institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, Musée Guimet, the DIOR Collection, and the Walker Art Center. He was awarded the Gelman Trust Fellowship in 2003 as well as the GNMH Award.