Among the artists who have succeeded in recent years in shaping the cross-sectorality that has characterized the arts and their relationship to each other is surely Daniel Arsham. From collaborations with IKEA to those with Virgil Abloh, a strong connection to Kim Jones’ vision at Dior and the pop world of Pokémon and race cars. Daniel Arsham has managed to bring his neo-archaeology to a world where products are objects that live a short life and soon become commodities stacked in the pile of superfluous objects.
It is the concept of time that binds all of the American artist’s works, which stem from preparatory sketches drawn in pencil by the artist himself and now collected in a book published by Princeton University Press and titled “Daniel Arsham Sketchbook.”
Some sketches from his project with IKEA and the Rimowa suitcase appear in the book, another example of how Arsham has managed to take a predominant cultural phenomenon of recent years and bring it into his own art.
The sketches are accompanied in some cases by captions explaining details of the work or just pointing out its name. Super Mario and Luigi, ancient statues and the New York Yankees cap, these are Arsham’s ideas that appear in the volume, in an unprecedented version compared to the concrete coldness typical of the artist’s work. 300 pages at a cost of $35, with drawings that come from the untold past.
