Born in Nice in 1928, Arman is one of the first signatories (along with Klein, Hains, Raysse, Tinguely, Villeglé, Dufrêne) and prominent exponent of Nouveau Réalisme, the movement born around the critic Pierre Restany who in April 1960 drafted the manifesto. "The Nouveau Réalisme is a revolution of the gaze, a new dimension of sensitivity". The movement derives, while taking its distance, from the Dadaist avant-gardes of the beginning of the century, of which it takes up the dissacrating attitude towards traditional art. With his exclusive action, the artist performs a process of dissemblage when the object/work of art is not simply exposed, but subjected to a destructive action metaphor of the violence that society exerts on moral values.
