Daniel Arsham’s Time Fold brings new and historical works to Perrotin, including five rarely seen drawings from the artist’s archive, shown publicly for the first time.
Daniel Arsham: Time Fold
4th June, 2026 – 8th August, 2026
Perrotin London
Claridge’s
Brook Mews
London
W1K 4HR
Perrotin presents Time Fold, an exhibition of new and historical works by Daniel Arsham, bringing together sculpture, painting and works on paper from nearly two decades of the artist’s practice. The exhibition traces Arsham’s enduring fascination with geology, archaeology and the cultural residue of the recent past, staging time not as a line but as a material condition: something that erodes, crystallises, collapses and returns.
At the centre of Time Fold is a dialogue between several of Arsham’s major bodies of work and a group of five archival drawings made between 2007 and 2010, exhibited publicly for the first time. These early works sharpen the exhibition’s central proposition: that Arsham’s project has always been less about nostalgia than about temporal slippage, the strange afterlife of objects, and the unstable border between ruin and preservation.
Arsham has long described his practice through the idea of ‘fictional archaeology’: an imagined future in which the material culture of the recent past has been buried, transformed by mineral processes, and later recovered as relics. In Time Fold, that archaeology turns inward. The exhibition becomes an excavation not only of objects, icons and artefacts, but of Arsham’s own visual history.
The exhibition opens with Arsham’s eroded busts and classical figures, works that fuse the iconography of ancient sculpture with the mineral vocabulary of the natural world. In Grey Selenite Eroded Bust of Zeus, the commanding features of one of antiquity’s most powerful deities are overtaken by crystalline growth. The nearly two-metre-tall Bronze Eroded Bust of Pericles, cast in bronze and polished stainless steel and on view in the Claridge’s lobby, extends this logic into monumental scale. These works do not simply mourn the past. They propose a more elastic relationship with it, one in which deep history and the present moment appear to occupy the same charged field.
Daniel Arsham, Portrait Bust of Duke Nemours and Floating Geometry, 2007. Gouache on mylar
37.1 × 29.2 cm | 14.6 × 11.5 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
The same logic governs Arsham’s treatment of objects from popular and consumer culture, where the familiar detritus of twentieth-century life undergoes its own petrifying transformation. Works including Ash and Pyrite Eroded Pentax 6×7 75mm Camera and Grey Selenite Eroded Space Odyssey Movie Poster collapse the distance between antiquity and the late twentieth century. In Arsham’s speculative archaeology, a 1970s camera and a Greek hero can become neighbours in the same imagined ruin. The effect is quietly disarming: a reassessment of what culture decides to preserve, what it lets decay, and what may return looking stranger than before.
See also
A new body of sculptures composed of sand introduces another register of instability. Where earlier works evoke erosion through mineral accumulation, these new sculptures foreground fragility itself. Their forms suggest objects on the brink of disappearance, testing the conditions under which matter might fail to endure at all.
Crucial to the exhibition are five works on paper drawn from Arsham’s archives. Three gouache works on mylar — Apollo Belvedere; Geometry in Collapse, Portrait Bust of Duke Nemours and Floating Geometry, and Statue of a Wounded Amazon and Geometry — depict classical figures overlaid with flat, architectural geometries. Their compositional structure directly anticipates the mineral intrusions of Arsham’s later sculptural work. Alongside them, Camera Study in Gouache and Rolleiflex Camera Study in Gouache turn the analogue camera into an object of careful, almost elegiac attention, a subject Arsham would later return to in sculpture.
Seen together, these early works reveal that Arsham’s central preoccupations were present from the outset: collapse, preservation, fiction, archaeology, and the seductive unreliability of time. Time Fold is not a retrospective in miniature, nor a straightforward exercise in chronology. It is an argument that past and future are not opposites but coexisting states, and that every object, in Arsham’s hands, is already becoming something else.
Daniel Arsham: Time Fold opens on the 4th of June, 2026 until the 8th of August, 2026 at Perrotin London
© 2026 Perrotin
Art Plugged is a contemporary platform inspired by a relationship with the broader arts communities. We provide our audience with curated insight into the world of art, from exhibitions to artist interviews and more.