About Daniel Arsham
Daniel Arsham’s uchronic aesthetics revolves around his concept of fictional archaeology. Working in sculpture, architecture, drawing, and film, he creates and crystallizes ambiguous in-between spaces or situations, and further stages what he refers to as future relics of the present. They are eroded casts of modern artifacts and contemporary human figures, which he expertly makes out of some geological material such as sand, selenite, or volcanic ash for them to appear as if they had just been unearthed after being buried for ages. Always iconic, most of the objects that he turns into stone refer to the late 20th century or millennial era, when technological obsolescence unprecedentedly accelerated along with the digital dematerialization of our world. While the present, the future, and the past poetically collide in his haunted yet playful visions between romanticism and pop art, Daniel Arsham also experiments with the timelessness of certain symbols and gestures across cultures.
From The Publisher
The work of renowned contemporary artist Daniel Arsham blurs the lines between art, architecture, archeology, and design. In his distinctive style, he takes ancient artworks and objects from twentieth-century pop culture and casts sculptures of them in geological materials such as quartz or volcanic ash, colliding past, present, and future in haunted yet playful visions that prompt viewers to question their everyday surroundings. Gathered from interviews and other sources, Arsham-isms is a collection of lively, thought-provoking, and memorable quotations from this exciting young creative talent on a wide range of subjects—including art, architecture, film, design, pop culture, the art world, and what it means to be a globally recognized artist today.
Select quotations from the book:
- “Art needs to be a little dangerous.”
- “You don’t have to own the thing to be part of it.”
- “This work for me is not about progress. It is about destruction and growth and where they are able to meet in the middle.”