Gas Tank City review: Andrew Holmes draws truck-stop America

D-Best, Andrew Holmes, from Gas Tank City

(Image credit: Andrew Homes)

Photorealism has a strong connection to the American West, a landscape of signs and shapes, logos and colours, utterly in thrall to the combustion engine with all the chrome-plated glamour and ennui that entails. Andrew Holmes is the latest in a long line of artists to find fascination with this rich iconography.

Joy, Andrew Holmes, from *Gas Tank City*

The London-based artist and academic not only has a longstanding connection to the city's Architectural Association (AA), but also a reputation as one of the leading contemporary photorealists. Gas Tank City is Holmes’ newest monograph, a compilation of drawings undertaken over half a century of travel to the heartland of American highway culture.

Propane, Andrew Holmes, from *Gas Tank City*

The monograph contains 100 of these drawings, all made using colour pencils on a large scale to create a seamless photorealist effect. Seventeen of the drawings go on display at the AA to accompany the publication, and the subject matter is both instantly evocative and impressively rendered.

Diesel #2, Andrew Holmes, from GAS TANK CITY — Diesel #2, Andrew Holmes, from *Gas Tank City*

From one perspective, Gas Tank City can be seen as a chronicle of a dying world, the gasoline-powered highways and freight routes that have come to embody the modern American West. It is a reflective realm of stainless steel trailers, chrome bumpers, massive trucks and a forest of signage. For a trained architect like Holmes, these spaces form a powerfully anti-designed landscape, an unplanned environment that’s nevertheless the result of countless design decisions.

GAS TANK CITY, Andrew Holmes, Circa Press — *Gas Tank City*, Andrew Holmes, Circa Press

As a result, the drawings have a special power, not just because of their technical mastery, but through their ability to freeze a moment in time, a chaotic swirl of juxtaposition, reflection and alignment that all comes together on the page. Necessarily, it is an artwork of fragments, of carefully chosen pieces of modernity assembled in just the right way, a highly disciplined act that starts with the physical immersion in the worlds depicted.

‘David Greene said I am a monk, but a monk in a car. If the car and the drawing board are my cell, I have spent more than 20 years alone in it,’ Homes writes. Gas Tank City is the result of this impressive period of devotion.

From GAS TANK CITY, Andrew Holmes — From *Gas Tank City*, Andrew Holmes

Andrew Holmes’ drawings are on show at the Front Members’ Room, The Architectural Association, 36 Bedford Square, London from 20 September – 7 December 2024, AAschool.ac.uk

Gas Tank City, Andrew Holmes, published by Circa Press, £75, Circa.Press. Also available at Amazon.co.uk

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Jonathan Bell has written for Wallpaper* magazine since 1999, covering everything from architecture and transport design to books, tech and graphic design. He is now the magazine’s Transport and Technology Editor. Jonathan has written and edited 15 books, including Concept Car Design, 21st Century House, and The New Modern House. He is also the host of Wallpaper’s first podcast.