Daniel Arsham

Daniel Arsham is a master manipulator. The Miami-raised, New York–based artist masterminds large-scale installations that distort perceptions of space and architecture, a practice originating from his college years at Cooper Union, where he received the Gelman Trust Fellowship Award in 2003. There, he met architect Alex Mustonen who, as the story goes, initially helped him draw a staircase for an assignment. Five years later, Arsham enlisted Mustonen’s architectural expertise for an excavated wall installation at a Dior Homme boutique in Los Angeles. Thus birthed Snarkitecture, an ongoing collaborative practice that experiments on the spectrum between art and architecture. Notable for their inflated scale and eye-catching use of monochrome, Snarkitecture's commissions include KITH boutiques in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Miami, a Valextra flagship in Milan, and a COS outpost in Los Angeles.

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When not directing Snarkitecture, Arsham maintains his own artistic practice characterized by simple yet paradoxical gestures toward preconceived notions of what architecture should be. Such structural experiments run the gamut from crumbling walls to decaying cultural artifacts. Take “3018,” his solo exhibition at Galerie Perrotin in New York, opening on September 8. Two crumbling vehicles, each an easily recognizable icon of pop culture, occupy the gallery’s ground level. Arsham rendered each in crystal, and volcanic ash, pyrite crystal, selenite, and quartz appear where mechanical components should be. Other works on display, he quips, “make architecture do things it isn’t supposed to do.”