20 Years, A journey through Eroded Reflections

Daniel Arsham makes new things look excavated. He was born in Cleveland in 1980, studied at Design and Architecture High School in Miami, and received the Gelman Trust Fellowship Award at The Cooper Union, an early mark of what was to come.

20 Years, at Perrotin in New York, marked two decades of work with Emmanuel Perrotin and gathered the range of his practice. The best-known gesture is there: classical statues worn away to reveal crystal inside, as seen at Tiffany’s flagship on Fifth Avenue. Decay and renewal sit in the same object.

His collaborations have taken the work well beyond the gallery: with Pharrell Williams and Hedi Slimane, with Dior and with Porsche. In the show, eroded watches and veiled verses, large in scale and close in feeling, treat time as something built and something felt.

Nostalgia runs through the show, though not the comfortable kind. Arsham’s eroded cars and Star Wars figures look like finds from a future dig, and they ask how long anything we prize will last.

Across twenty years the work has grown from small interventions in architecture to much larger ones, while the subject has stayed time. Classical antiquities and recent pop artefacts receive the same treatment, and the crystal that breaks through suggests decay as a kind of disclosure rather than an end.

The galleries were lit low, so that the crystal interiors caught the light and the eroded surfaces fell into shadow. It is work that is best walked around slowly.

Seen together, the pieces have a quiet, even rhythm, and the visitor ends up measuring time against them.

The exhibition ran at Perrotin until October 14, 2023.

PHOTOS A. SAKAE

( left to right on web, top to down on mobile )
Daniel Arsham, ‘Pulling Falling Clock’, 2023; ‘Selenite Eroded Wrist Watch 5’, 2023; ‘Extruded Hand with Game Controller’, 2023. Please note the colors in the photos may not accurately represent the true colors of the artworks. The photos have been processed for this publication.