In 100 Hotel Sketches Daniel Arsham compiles 100 drawings made over the last few years as Arsham has travelled for exhibitions and installations worldwide.
Arsham's self-described "first love," drawing, has consistently been an important discipline for the artist, including a daily sketchbook practice which he started at the age of nine. Early on in his career, Arsham's drawings became a ritual to plan for new artworks. In his current practice, Arsham similarly uses drawing as a space of boundless creativity where he conjures ideas for large-scale installations and the implementation of new materials.
As Arsham's career has taken him across the globe, he began to incorporate the hotel stationary from his travels within his everyday sketching practice. Especially interested in working on letterhead from historic hotels, the artist composes his ideas, usually with an image and text, juxtaposing past and present, a theme echoed within his practice.
This volume contains 100 of Arsham's Hotel Sketches, which serve as a physical archive of Arsham's travel as well as the transformation of his style and mark-making over time. Produced on the occasion of Daniel Arsham's 20th anniversary of working with Emmanuel Perrotin, 100 Hotel Sketches contains direct studies for artworks on view at Perrotin in his dual exhibitions in Paris and New York.
Born 1980 in Cleveland, Daniel Arsham lives and works in New York City. His uchronic aesthetics revolves around his concept of fictional archaeology. Working in sculpture, architecture, drawing and film, he creates and crystallizes ambiguous in-between spaces or situations, and further stages what he refers to as future relics of the present. They are eroded casts of modern artifacts and contemporary human figures, which he expertly makes out of some geological material such as sand, selenite or volcanic ash for them to appear as if they had just been unearthed after being buried for ages. 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, Daniel Arsham also experiments with the timelessness of certain symbols and gestures across cultures.
