joshua vides turns the petersen into a drawn garage
At the Petersen Automotive Museum in LA, Joshua Vides has turned a gallery of vehicles into a walk-in black-and-white drawing.
The Los Angeles-based artist’s exhibit, Flat Out: The Art of Joshua Vides, takes over the Armand Hammer Foundation Gallery with five hand-painted vehicles, tire stacks, gas pumps, wall graphics, and large garage signs, all rendered in his crisp monochrome linework.
The space reads at first like an auto body shop removed of color. A sign for Vides Automobile Body hangs above an arched opening, checkered flags run across the ceiling, and a blunt NO PARKING graphic stretches across the wall.
The familiar items of vehicle culture are still there, but Vides flattens them into something more detailed to a major sketch, using black lines to trace seams, shadows, panels, and edges throughout every surface area. Flat Out will be on view till July 5th, 2027.
images © Petersen Automotive Museum joshua vides brings’reality to idea’ to the petersen For artist Joshua Vides, who is based in Los Angeles, Flat Out extends a body of work he calls Reality to Idea. His technique is direct in method and unusual in effect. Real items are covered in white, then marked with crisp black lines that trace edges, shadows, joints, and surface area breaks.
The work keeps the things totally present while providing it the optical quality of a sketch, somewhere between display room object and hand-drawn image.
At the Petersen, that language expands from specific items into a full environment. Vides invested nine days hand-painting the five automobiles together with the gallery walls and garage components, forming the space into a monochrome vehicle set.
The museum keeps in mind that his past partnerships consist of names such as Nike, Converse, Fendi, Google, and G-Shock, but here the scale shifts. The vehicle becomes one canvas amongst lots of, held inside a bigger drawing that visitors can walk through.
Joshua
Vides turns a Petersen Automotive Museum gallery into a black-and-white mechanic’s garage vehicles become illustrations without losing their weight Throughout Flat Out, Joshua Vides’ cars keep their physical heft even as their surfaces are visually flattened. A Ferrari seen from behind is decreased to thick outlines around its taillights, vents, license plate, and rear glass.
A Mercedes sits underneath the blunt typography of NO PARKING, its grille and bodywork honed by the same hand-painted linework utilized on the surrounding pumps and tires. Elsewhere, a low coupe catches the eye through layers of foreground shapes, as if the entire space has actually ended up being a storyboard frame.
The gallery’s reflective floor includes another layer to the impression. Black lines double underneath the cars and trucks, and white body panels liquify into the pale ground.
The walls bring large borders that make the architecture check out like a flattened background, while framed window graphics simulate the diagonal marks of glass reflections. Even the stacks of tires bring repeated tread marks, turning a practical garage things into pattern.
5 cars are hand-painted with crisp lays out as part of Flat Out: The Art of Joshua Vides flat out: a mechanic’s garage inside the museum The installation works because it utilizes the visual grammar of cars and truck culture without dealing with the automobiles as distant icons. Vides draws from the daily space around the automobile, the repair work bay, the body store, the pump, the tire pile, and offers those details the exact same status as the cars and trucks themselves. The garage enters into the work, with its own signs, edges, jokes, and visual rhythm.
Within the Petersen’s bigger collection, Flat Out offers a various method to take a look at automotive design. Instead of leaning into surface, rarity, or performance alone, the exhibition asks what occurs when a lorry’s surface area is translated by hand. Body lines, headlights, vents, and spoilers become marks. The automobile is still there, but its identity now depends upon drawing, memory, and the audience’s motion through space.
black lays out trace body panels, headlights, vents, and glass to flatten each automobile into a graphic structure a Vides Auto Body sign positions the imaginary garage at the Petersen’s address on Wilshire Boulevard