Olafur Eliasson’s collaboration with BMW went far beyond the original remit of the company’s Art Car program. Traditionally, the company has commissioned a leading visual artist to swathe a current production model with a representative sample of their (usually canvas-based) art.
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All good, but also relatively conventional, with the likes of David Hockney and Alexander Calder breaking out the paint brushes to turn folded metal into mobile museum pieces. For 2008, BMW decided to do something different, employing the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson to take an alternative approach.
From the outset, Eliasson questioned the brief, wondering aloud about the car’s role as a fetish object, the environmental impact of the industry and the changing landscape that might result. Taking BMW’s H2R research car as the starting point - a hydrogen powered concept - Eliasson’s team experimented tirelessly with frozen water, devising a way to ‘cloak’ the hydrogen-drive mechanicals with transient ‘bodywork’ that depended on the existence of a frozen microclimate to survive.
INFORMATION
Your mobile expectations: BMW H2R project: Olafur Eliasson, Lars Müller Publishers, €34.90
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