The exhibition “Motion – Cars, Art, Architecture” curated by Norman Foster at the Guggenheim Bilbao aims to highlight the interactions between the automobile and the various design disciplines. However, the architect focuses on his stars on four wheels, some of which are among the most precious vehicles in the world.
The exhibition “Motion – Cars, Art, Architecture” curated by Norman Foster at the Guggenheim Bilbao aims to highlight the interactions between the automobile and the various design disciplines. However, the architect focuses on his stars on four wheels, some of which are among the most precious vehicles in the world.
Anyone who follows the now 86-year-old on Instagram knows that Norman Foster is a car enthusiast. Foster regularly posts pictures there showing him at classic car rallies and historic vehicle meetings. In the large entrance area of his foundation in Madrid, there are not only several gems from his collection. Behind the large glass façade are also hundreds of models of everything that can move under its own power – cars, locomotives, airplanes. “Motion” is also the name of Foster’s latest project: an exhibition at the Guggenheim Bilbao.
Norman Foster describes the show at the Guggenheim Bilbao as a kind of “requiem for the combustion engine”. The focus is on icons from a century of automotive history, starting with Carl Benz’s famous motorized tricycle. With the selection of vehicles on display, Foster attempts to do justice to various aspects of his love of cars. On the one hand, there are vehicles that are directly related to architecture. Buckminster Fuller’s “Dymaxion Car”, for example. Foster had his teacher’s design from 1933 rebuilt in 2010. Or the Voisin C7 Lumineuse from 1925: Le Corbusier not only owned a vehicle of this type, which he repeatedly had photographed with his houses. The company also financed the design of Le Corbusier’s famous Plan Voisin. Le Corbusier’s “Voiture Minimum” is also on display at the Guggenheim Bilbao as a reconstruction. The architect designed it in 1936 as his contribution to the theme of the people’s automobile.
Of course, they can all be found in the exhibition – Ford T, Volkswagen, Fiat 500, BMW 600, Mini, 2 CV, Renault 4 – the vehicles that first made mass mobility possible for the United States and then for Europeans after the Second World War. At the other end of the scale, Norman Foster and his team also show the automotive gems that are sold for millions and millions at the major auction houses today. The Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic from the Mullin Collection, for example, an automobile sculpture by Jean Bugatti from 1936. Only three of these vehicles were built. The vehicle from the Mullin Collection cost 38 million dollars in 2010. The value of the 1962 Ferrari GTO from the collection of Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason is likely to be just under 80 million dollars today.
Even if the focus is on the vehicles, Norman Foster is interested in showing the links between automotive progress, art and architecture. That is why the exhibition at the Guggenheim Bilbao includes works by the Italian Futurists as well as works by Brancusi, Warhol and Christo. All of these works of art reflect the automobile in one form or another, whether as inspiration or as a motif. But the exhibition also explores architecture’s preoccupation with the car, one of the main themes of modernism. Norman Foster and his team could certainly have given even more space to this important issue. An exhibition focusing on this anything but crisis-free interrelationship would certainly be an exciting challenge for the car-loving architect and his foundation.
Motion – Cars, Art, Architecture
Museo Guggenheim Bilbao
Avenida Abandoibarra, 2
48009 Bilbao
until September 18, 2022
