Daniel Arsham

Miami Does Paris, 2006 
Collection Miami Art Museum, museum purchase with funds from the MAM Collectors Council.

Among the many different visions of Miami on view in Miami in Transition at MAM in 2006, Daniel Arsham's work employed the broadest range of media.  His contributions encompassed a model parking garage which spelled out the word "want," a marble sculpture of an iceberg supporting a modernist building and drawings incorporating isolated elements of Miami Modern architecture within the Everglades.  Miami does Paris, first exhibited at the Frieze Art Fair, London in October 2006, presents a scaled-down intersection of two very differently styled staircases. One is the elegant double-flight neoclassical staircase that leads to the Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris. The other is the Miami Modern interior staircase in the Perrotin gallery in Miami. In combining the two, Arsham cunningly reverses the orientation of the Miami staircase so that it thrusts forwards, wedging between the parted flights of the Paris staircase and splitting them in two. This aggressive mating contrasts the rigid lines of the Miami staircase with the sinuous curves of its Paris counterpart. The result is a jarring contrast of Old World and New, of classic and modern.

Daniel Arsham has a BFA from New York City's Cooper Union. He has exhibited at the Galerie Perrotin in both Miami and Paris, and MOCA at Goldman Warehouse, Miami. In addition to Miami in Transition, his work has been included in group exhibitions such as Greater New York, P.S.1 Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Ever, Placemaker, Miami, FL (2003) and Miami in Manhattan, Wooster Projects, New York, NY (2001). He was one of the founders of The House and Placemaker, two important artist collectives in Miami.