Car. Art. Message. Arman and his "accumulations"

When the automobile becomes everyone's object, art seeks to assign it a role. This is what Arman did — the working name of Armand Pierre Fernandez — in the 1960s, when alongside another artist of extraordinary significance, Yves Klein, he founded the Nouveau Réalisme movement in Paris. The sensitivity to art shown by the house of Renault granted him the financial support to create sculptures and works that accumulated crushed automobiles or bare mechanical components, making clear how the car had become an object of consumption and of cruel abandonment.

His art, which certainly did not confine itself to the automobile — his works involving musical instruments, tools, and much else besides are celebrated — announced itself immediately as powerful and unmistakable, the moment his sculptures on this theme appeared in the street.
"Long Term Parking" by Arman transforms 60 automobiles embedded in concrete into a powerful monument to consumption, to time, and to dreams destined to dissolve.
Magnificent and renowned is the work christened "Long Term Parking", in which some 60 real automobiles lie submerged in concrete, side by side, a symbolic cemetery of dreams and aspirations.

The concept of accumulation — joining identical objects one to another — finds a particularly resonant expression at the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari in Imola: to honour the legendary Enzo, Arman had around thirty Ferrari F40 scale models brought together to form a sculpture five metres tall and 3.60 metres wide. An accumulation of scale models installed in 1995 at the entrance to the circuit, the cars climbing skyward as though reaching for their creator.
Installed at the entrance of the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari stands "Rampante", a work by Arman restored in 2023 — around thirty scale models of the F40 rising as a vertical sculpture, a symbol of momentum and of memory.
The Accumulazione Ferrari F40 by Arman, restored in 2023, is installed at the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari as a tribute to Enzo Ferrari. Around thirty scale models climb upward as a vertical sculpture, a symbol of aspiration and of memory directed toward the "creator."

Arman's imagination does not rest with cars. Striking and arresting is the work in Beirut that brings together military vehicles — armoured carriers among them — as a symbol of the wreckage wrought by war and a hope for peace that, unhappily, seems reluctant to arrive. Lighter in spirit is the encounter between Yamaha motorcycles and a grand piano, cut into three sections, through which the motorcycles pass to join their own voice to the harmony of music.
Spirit of Yamaha by Arman is an accumulation that fuses the two souls of the Yamaha Corporation: music and mechanics. It sets a piano and motorcycles in dialogue, bringing together sonic harmony and industrial velocity within a single sculptural form.