ROME – The sinuous shapes of the 1936 Bugatti Tipo 57SC Atlantic, the Hispano-Suiza H6B Dubonnet Xenia and the yellow of the 1952 Pegaso Z-102 Cúpula. And again: the 1954 Alfa Romeo Bat car 7 up to the Clay Modeling Studio of Cadillac of the clay model of the brand’s first fully electric vehicle. These are just some of the works exhibited until September 18 at “Motion. Autos, Art, Architecture ”, a major exhibition conceived for the Guggenheim in Bilbao by Norman Foster, British architect and designer, one of the leading exponents of high-tech architecture.
” The exhibition illustrates how artists and architects have anticipated and mirrored the era of movement on the one hand and the automobile in particular, “explains Foster. “To give a few examples, the works of sculptors such as Boccioni and Brancusi show how the collective imagination involves both artists and automotive designers in the same way. A large number of automobile designers, in fact, have a background in art and architecture. ”
He also wanted to highlight, he added, “ how the iconography of the stencils with American symbols on the Military Jeep has an echo in the artistic work of pop artist Robert Indiana. Just as the precision of automotive engineering is celebrated in Donald Judd’s work. Even automotive design projects in the digital age still rely on one-to-one scale clay models. The parallel with the artists’ sketches, today as yesterday, is obvious, and it is the reason why I have also included reproductions of the models offered by the General Motors Cadillac Division ”.
When asked whether cars represent the spirit of the times more than other inventions, Forster replies by saying that “they are a valid warning sign, so important that they appear alongside other cultural products that, individually and collectively, better define our historical moment as the painting, sculpture, cinema, photography and architecture ”.
The exhibition, curated with Lekha Hileman Waitoller and Manuel Cirauqui of the Spanish museum and a team from the Norman Foster Foundation, tells the story of the beginnings, when the car replaced the horse-drawn vehicles and the shapes began to be aerodynamically modeled with the wind chamber. , the Fifties with the design of cars that became icons and the attempt to produce a ” car for the people ” within everyone’s reach. Then the Sixties dominated by Formula One races and by the distinction between racing, luxury and road cars in which cinema with its stars had a lot of weight, and the most futuristic projects, up to the chapter dedicated to America, the first country where the machinery company has also shown the environmental impact. (fp)