A BMW is a piece of art in itself and so when you have renowned artists using these beauties as their canvas, the result can be pure brilliance. This, in brief is the concept behind the acclaimed BMW Car Art CollectionIt all started in 1975 when auctioneer and racing driver Herve' Polain, in an attempt to make his BMW 3.0CSL stand out asked his artist friend Alexander Calder to alter its appearance. The result was so breathtaking that BMW decided to continue the experiment and so you had artists like Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol doing up BMW production cars with their artwork.
Since BMW is trying to enter the Indian market in a big way, it made sense to showcase these babies to car lovers here. This was the intention behind displaying two of the most popular Art Cars at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai from the 7th-16th of September 07. The cars in display were the ones done by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.
1977 BMW 320i Group 5 Racing Version by Roy Lichtenstein (1977)
Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997)
is considered to be one of the founders of American pop art. His early works range from cubism to expressionalism and by 1961 he started creating his pop art paintings. It was followed by caricatures of the "American way of life". Roy spent a lot of his life in New YorkFor this project, Roy wanted the lines he painted to be a depiction of the road showing the car where to go. In his own words, "The design also shows the countryside through which the car has traveled. One could call it an enumeration of everything a car experiences - only that this car reflects all of these things before actually being on a road". The oversized "Benday Dots" are characteristic of Lichtenstein's world famous paintings of comic strips.
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1979 BMW M1 Group 4 Racing Version by Andy Warhol (1979)
Andy Warhol (1928-1987)
is the quintessence of pop art. He started out as a commercial artist and was successful in holding his own exhibition in New York as early as 1952. In 1956 his work was acknowledged with the coveted "Art Director's club Award". His legendary concept of "Factory" was created in 1962. Warhol also did a lot of celebrity portraits and paintings of trivial objects.Being the maverick that Warhol was, he decided to paint the car from the start till the end unlike his predecessors who worked on a scaled model and then left it to assistants to paint the final model. Quoting Andy "I have tried to give a vivid depiction of speed. If the car is really fast, all contours and colors will become blurred"
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Scaled models of the other BMW Art Cars
3 comments:
Dude... this is ART! Anyone who wants to drive this must be shot dead! These are cars to be looked at, admired, touched may be... but no driving them!
I want one of these in my living room! Coming out of a wall... between my dining room and living room (if I ever find such a big house in Bombay). First preference: car 1,1 in scaled models, or may be even 2,3... or may be 1,3 on my roof.
Though have very little interest in cars, I seriously admire the work of art that has stroked from the artists' brush.
Ooooh, snazzy....
♥
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