Renault, thanks to its industrial expertise, has played a major role on the French and international art scene. As a matter of fact, it possesses an impressive art collection. Who knew Robert Doisneau had made his debut at Renault as an industrial photographer in the 1930's? Unfortunately (for Renault at least), he was laid off five years later, for being consistently late.
Victor Vasarely, French-Hungarian artist, and father of optical illusion, was sponsored by Renault to redesign its logo, which he did in 1972. And today, some of his paintings are hanging in Renault HQ meeting rooms in Boulogne-Billancourt.
Artist Arman, who started his collaboration with Renault in 1967, even declared that it was "as if someone had opened the doors of a palace where I could help myself to anything"...a number of car parts "accumulations" were born from this collaboration.
Today, Erwin Wurm, Austrian artist, is playing with a Renault classic, the R25. Using a 1:1-scale model of a 1991 R25, the artist gave it a twist and completely remodeled it, to make it look tilted.
His most emblematic pieces, like the "Fat House" or his "Fat Cars", are blown up, distorted, and transfer to the object, very human specificities, like the ability to put on weight and lose it as one wishes. This work is a take on the Austrian expression, where a fat car is actually a rich person's car. His work focuses on the consumer society we live in. His distortions raise the question of whether what we see is the result of a reality or of a subjectivity.
Erwin Wurm, Fat car, 2005 ©
Erwin Wurm, Fat house, (credit Colin Davison), Baltic, 2006 ©
Erwin Wurm's R25/1991 is part of the "Pink Caviar" exhibition at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, until August 19, 2012.
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