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Here is my latest diecast model to my collection. You can read the story behind this car below.

It’s a calculated collision of auto and art.

Frank Stella began studying art at the Phillips Academy in Andover at the tender age of 14, and went on to study history at Princeton. After this, he set up a studio in New York in which many of his much acclaimed, “Traditional Paintings” and “Black Paintings” were produced. An exhibition of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art as early on as 1959. During this creative period, the influence of the abstract Expressionists is unmistakable. The “post abstractionist”, mostly large-scale pop art paintings he produced in the 1960s are now art history. Between 1960 and 1980, Stella exhibited throughout the world, while continuing to work as a teacher. From 1978 to 1980 a traveling exhibition took place in the U.S.A. showing retrospective of his work. His subsequent creative works consist mainly of relief pictures.

“My design is like a blueprint transferred to the bodywork.”

Frank Stella not only converts his ideas into various media with dramatic diversity – he is also a passionate motor racing fan. For this reason he was all the more determined to succeed as he set about the task of individually decoration a BMW Coupe back in 1976

While working on his draft version, Stella dissociated himself from his usual random style of painting and sought inspiration from the car’s technical aura. The result: a black and white square grid with an evenness and precision reminiscent of oversized graph paper. Within this grid, pattern-like, dotted lines run across the bodywork, suggesting that Stella may have wished to cut out the car and reassembled it in a new shape.

The grid pattern – a feature of both Stella’s earlier and later creative periods – is often used by him as a kind of stage upon which a painted drama takes place. By way of contrast, the paintwork he created specially for the Le Mans race is not a stage, but the action itself. However, Stella was against any over-interpretation of his work. His own assessment was if anything reserved: “The resulting colored pattern should be regarded as agreeable decoration. (more…)