DANIEL ARSHAM

Early Life

Raised in Miami, Daniel Arsham attended The Cooper Union in New York. He graduated in 2003 and received the Gelman Trust Fellowship award. His ensuing practice has crossed drawing, film, sculpture, installation, and architecture, playfully historicising cultural and material icons of the present.

Artworks

Arsham’s sculptural work often presents eroded casts of objects and architectural elements that appear as if unearthed after centuries of burial—future relics of the present. Working with materials such as sand, ash, and other geologic substances, he produces surfaces that seem to crystallise, decay, or crumble, suggesting archaeological remains from an imagined future.

Arsham’s chosen subjects include everyday objects, design icons, and references to popular culture, as well as classical statuary and architectural fragments. By partially eroding or fragmenting these forms, he questions how cultural images persist, are remembered, or are forgotten over time.

In parallel with these sculptural “fictional archaeology” series, Arsham has produced projects such as the “Fractured Idols” and “Labyrinth” works, which reconfigure classical and popular iconography through processes of fragmentation and erosion. His recent “Labyrinth” paintings and reliefs, for example, appeared in his exhibition What Remains at Perrotin Dubai (2025–26), where they were shown alongside new sculptural pieces and drawings that consider how images circulate and persist across time.

Architecture is a core element of Daniel Arsham’s practice, and he often manipulates or reimagines architectural space. Early in his career, he created installations in which walls appeared to melt, crumble, or open into other spaces, and he has continued to stage works in which staircases, portals, and structural elements become uncanny or dysfunctional. He has also constructed surreal environments, including landscapes in which natural forces seem to overtake built structures.

Continuing this interest, What Remains transformed Perrotin Dubai into a sonic environment using a new series of copper-wrapped bonsai-tree sculptures that double as functional stereo speakers, filling the exhibition with ambient sound. These works pay homage to Japanese Zen Buddhist culture and extend earlier sand zen gardens by integrating sound and technology into an immersive architectural setting.

Beyond the gallery walls, Daniel Arsham has a long history of sustained collaboration. Arsham founded Snarkitecture—a collaborative design practice—in 2007 with Alex Mustonen. In 2014 he established ‘Film the Future’, creating films set in a fictional future civilisation.

Daniel Arsham’s collaborative practice has also extended to set design for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company—including for the company’s last performance ever—and the Athens Hellenic Festival. He has worked with Adidas, created and sold a range of functional design objects, collaborated with Dior and Pharrell Williams, and in 2020 he became creative director for the Cleveland Cavaliers NBA team in his home state of Ohio.

In addition to physical sculpture and installations, Arsham has developed editioned works and design objects through Arsham Studio and Snarkitecture, and he has explored digital formats, including time-based NFT projects released on platforms such as Nifty Gateway.

Daniel Arsham’s art has enjoyed great success, showing in commercial contexts as well as gallery and institutional shows worldwide. His works feature in major public collections, such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; and the Blanton Museum of Art collection at the University of Texas at Austin. He has also presented large-scale solo exhibitions at institutions including UCCA Dune, Beidaihe (Sands of Time, 2021), which surveyed his sculptural and installation-based explorations of archaeology and temporality.

Daniel Arsham Exhibitions

Arsham has presented his work in numerous solo exhibitions, including:

• A Ripple in Time, Nanzuka Underground, Tokyo (2022);
• 31st Century Still Lives, Perrotin Tokyo (2022);
• Relics in the Landscape, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2022); Bronze Garden, 180 The Strand, London (2021);
• Moonraker, Carte Blanche à Daniel Arsham, Musée Guimet, Paris (2020);
• “3018”, Perrotin New York (2018); and
• The Future Was Then, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2016).

More recently, Perrotin New York presented 20 Years (2023), a solo exhibition that marked two decades of Arsham’s practice, bringing together works across sculpture, drawing, and installation. In 2025, Perrotin Dubai hosted What Remains, Arsham’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery in Dubai, which featured new sculptures, paintings, and drawings, as well as a sound installation that extended his ongoing engagement with time, memory, and material transformation.

Group exhibitions featuring Arsham’s work include Invento, OCA, São Paulo (2015); Painting the Glass House: Artists Revisit Modern Architecture, Mills College Art Museum, Oakland (2009); Projections, Carré d’art de Nîmes, France (2009); Heaven, 2nd Athens Biennale (2009); Greater New York, MoMA PS1, Long Island (2005); and Miami Nice, Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris (2004).

Daniel Arsham has also performed at museums including New Museum (2009) and Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille, France (2010). In 2011, as well as designing the set of RECESS for the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts, he performed the piece in collaboration with Jonah Bokaer.

Daniel Arsham FAQs

Ocula | 2026