Design

BMW artcar visits Shoreditch – We have a look in…

The Firedog studio dropped pens and crayons for just a few minutes recently to visit the BMW art car exhibition hosted in a nearby NCP garage.

The 35 year old collaboration between the ICA and BMW has featured many artists over the years; Warhol, Lichtenstein and Ndebele South African export, Esther Mahlangu. Unfortunately the exhibition is finished now, it ran from late July and finished up on the 4th August (Thanks Firedog for giving us advance warning). If it does happen to visit your neck of the woods, we strongly recommend that you have a look at the exhibit. There are some fine motoring examples mashed up with some bold contemporary art.

We did, however, take a bunch of photographs. Some of which you can see below. Our firm favourite was without a doubt the Jeff Koons piece, where the contours of the M3 GT2 fit beautifully with the colourful strands of highly polished imagery – Inspired by night time city lights and motion. Delectable!

The Warhol car was, sorta okay. You just got the feeling that he’d hurried it a bit, daubed some chunky acrylic onto the bodywork and then made up some kind of bogus post rationalisation. Not all ‘old’ masters were disappointing – The Lichtenstein number was wonderfully absorbed, a mimicry of the passing landscape with grasslands, sky and sun motifs. The best examples of the art car are definitely the Lichtenstein and Koons variant, whereby the car reflects both it’s surroundings and aesthetic values of speed – and artistically expressing the vehicles horizontal habitation of space and time. (Like a speed blur, innit.)