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“When I first started thinking about creating these fictional archeology works, certainly I could have taken an object and painted it like a trompe l’oeil to look old, but something about this material transformation gives a real feeling of authenticity and truth in the work. And of course, as an artist, my project is always to create something that is placing the viewer outside of their everyday and shifting their perspective.” — Daniel Arsham

Artist Daniel Arsham (b. 1980, Cleveland, OH) is currently featured in an exhibition of new work at Galerie Perrotin in Paris, Paris, 3020. Unfortunately, the exhibition has closed early due to mitigation efforts put in place for the COVID-19 pandemic. Lucky for us, Perrotin produced this trailer, featuring Arsham speaking about the exhibition, as well as a visit behind-the-scenes and in his studio as he prepared the sculptures and drawings for the show.

From Perrotin:

For this exhibition, Daniel Arsham will present a new suite of large-scale sculptures based on iconic busts, friezes and sculptures in the round from classical antiquity. Over the past year, Arsham has been granted unprecedented access to the Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais (RMN), a 200-year-old French molding atelier that reproduces masterpieces for several of Europe’s major encyclopedic museums. Arsham was able to use molds and scans of some of the most iconic works from the collections of the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Acropolis Museum in Athens, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the San Pietro in Vincoli as source material for this new body of work. Interested in the way that objects move through time, the works selected by Arsham are so iconic that they have eclipsed their status as mere art object, and instead have embedded themselves into our collective memory and identity.