The lockdown in 2019 forced Daniel Arsham to retool his practice. He returned to easel painting – the medium in which he initially trained – and produced a cycle of spellbinding images, in which the deep past meets a perhaps even deeper future. In these works, his longstanding concern with ruination took on unprecedented gravitas, possibly reflecting the dystopian tenor of the times. At the same time, though, Arsham was allowing himself to just play around. Without access to professional equipment and few materials at hand, he began modeling pieces of furniture in Play-Doh (of which his young sons had a healthy supply), reveling in the material’s immediacy and plasticity. The little forms he sculpted – a wobbly chair with a triangular back, partly inspired by a design by Wendell Castle; seating forms made simply by sticking blobs together; a dining table with more blobs holding up the top – were endearing, insouciant, fresh, direct.

Materials: Stone, resin, birch