Leila Heller Gallery is proud to present Shrines to Speed: Art and the Automobile, From the Post-war to the Post-modern, co-curated by Alexander Heller and Vivian Brodie, from May 5th to July 16th, 2016.  From ideas of acceleration, to the iconography of the liberation, to the dream of the open road, the American death drive of the automotive pervades the visual economy and theoretical discourse for artists from William Eggleston to Andy Warhol, John Baldessari to Rob Pruitt, Dennis Hopper to Jonathan Monk—all to be included in this groundbreaking exhibition.  The sixty plus works of art by nearly forty artists, additionally reflect international artistic responses to an US dominated ideology of car culture—either in its specificity as an object or in its symbolic significance—from Swiss-born Sylvie Fleury to Belgium’s Wim Delvoye.

The automobile is a cypher of desire, but also destruction.  The ‘need for speed’ as it is often called, annunciates a call for the road results as much in lurid exhilaration as it does in utter devastation.  In Shrines to Speed this reality is evoked by Warhol’s image of twisted piles of metal and steel, set against William Eggleston’s diptych portraying 1970s pleasure seeking culture with a man and woman posed alluringly, proudly, next to cars which appear not as backdrops for the image, but co-presences, even extensions of the subject’s bodies themselves.  Sylvie Fleury’s pastel pink sculptural address of the tragic in the experience of the automobile presents the unlikely scenario of a car being literally cut in two, whilst Wim Delvoye offers the viewer a pristine objet d’art in the form of tires carefully carved with motifs from gothic chapel stained glass window designs from his native Belgium.  Richard Prince’s Untitled (Van Door 3), a sculptural presentation of a van door suggests undisclosed cargo, the occult, even kidnapping, while his print Untitled (Upstate) presents a similar dead end of celebratory car culture as a vehicle appears stranded, abandoned, left in a field to rot—no way forward.

Car culture however is inextricably linked to the idea of the west, heading west, and the California sunset. Shrines to Speed recognizes this ideological horizon with the important inclusion of Ed Ruscha’s rare publication Every Building on Sunset Strip from 1966 (with other copies held at the MOMA and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), one of a number of photobook works completed by the West Coast artist between 1962 and 1970, which virtually invented the notion of the artist’s book today and which represents a key conceptual engagement with the road and the car as a framing device for a diffuse, highway centered experience of landscape. Likewise, John Baldesssari, a conceptual artist and fellow denizen of Angeleno Americana, is featured in an homage to his home town in National City, in a suite of eight archival photographs, layered over by hand painted acrylic circles. Meanwhile, Robert Bechtle and Richard Estes present sedate, even domestic, comforting images of the plebian city streets. Also included in this exhibition is a never before exhibited painting by Richard Diebenkorn a major figure in Abstract Expressionism in the Bay Area. Painted in 1957, on the cusp of the revolution of the American landscape with advent Highway act, this painting demonstrates how Diebenkorn applied his characteristic saturated hues to the icon of the automobile.

This exhibition also includes a new work from the Bruce High Quality Foundation, which exploits the cultural importance of cinema to the mythos of car culture as the brightly hued bumper of a New York City taxi, equipped with a motion sensing device, which interrupts the viewers experience, delivering the soundtrack of the movie Taxi itself as the spectator approaches.