DANIEL ARSHAM: WHAT REMAINS
PERROTIN is pleased to present What Remains, Daniel Arsham’s debut solo exhibition. This exhibition marks the first solo show since the opening of the Perrotin Dubai gallery. What Remains features several new series from Arsham's extensive practice, including sculpture, painting and drawing, and a new sound installation, focusing on themes of cultural memory, and the passage of time.
October 30, 2025 - January 10, 2026
Arsham will transform the gallery into a sonic installation with his latest sculptural series of copper wrapped bonsai tree sculptures. Doubling as functional stereo speakers, these works will play ambient music throughout the exhibition. This new series pays homage to Japanese Zen Buddhist culture and Arsham’s past presentations of sand zen gardens, which he has exhibited around the world at the Lotte Museum, South Korea and the Musée Guimet, France, among others.
Arsham also unveils a new suite of works relating to his recent Labyrinth series. Composed in cast sand, Arsham’s Stairs in a Labyrinth draws influence from artists like M.C. Escher and Renee Magritte’s maze-like works to create a sculptural double portrait. From head-on the work appears as a portrait bust of a sitter, transforming in the profile view into a maze of architectural levels and stairwells.
Alongside the sculpture, Arsham presents a still-life painting of another labyrinth bust and a selection of charcoal predatory drawings. In this series, Arsham beckons viewers to navigate intricate compositions, suggesting an interplay of layers and pathways reminiscent of archeological sites where the past reveals itself in unexpected ways.
Alongside these new series, Arsham expands his decades-long project of “Fictional Archaeology,” where the artist examines objects from the twentieth century that are containers for collective cultural memory. Cast in his signature materials of geologic crystals and pigmented hydrostone, patinated bronze, and fiberglass, Arsham presents objects like a Rolling Stone magazine eroded with pink quartz crystals, a NY Yankees hat that appears to be emerging out of the architecture of the wall, and a bronze scaled replica of a 1985 DMC Delorean car - immortalized in the film Back to the Future.
Arsham’s uchronic aesthetics revolves around his concept of fictional archaeology. Working in a multitude of disciplines he creates and crystallizes ambiguous in-between spaces and situations, and stages what he refers to as future relics of the present. Always iconic, most of the objects that he turns into stone refer to the late 20th century or millennial era, when technological obsolescence unprecedentedly accelerated along with the digital dematerialization of our world. While the present, the future and the past poetically collide in his haunted yet playful visions between romanticism and pop art, Arsham also experiments with the timelessness of certain symbols and gestures across cultures.