MAC Museum Art & Cars: Women in Cars
WHERE YOU MEET James Francis Gill mainly paints women getting out of a car or sitting in a car. In the early 1960s, a few of his paintings made it into New York's Museum of Modern Art.
Fifty years later, the pop artist revisits the subject, and works by him are currently on display under the title "60 Years of Women in Cars" at the MAC Museum Art & Cars in Singen, near the Swiss border.
Today's generation takes snapshots, selfies, stories, posts moments or short films. In the car, on the car, in front of the car, getting in and out, from the front, from the back, from above, with accessories or without, even with dogs.
Inspirations from Warhol and Liechtenstein
James Francis Gill didn't know social media when he started painting. But there was Time magazine, which at the time employed paparazzi who snapped those style icons, movie beauties and playboys arriving somewhere and getting out of the car.
The difference with the paparazzi photos was the color and emotion Gill put into his images. His style was and is unmistakably influenced by well-known contemporaries, one can recognize inspirations from Andy Warhol and Roy Liechtenstein: a closeness that Gill does not deny, but he feels he has created his own style.
Freedom for dreams and ideas
And why cars of all things? "When a woman gets out of a car, it is a very special movement," James Francis Gill is quoted as saying; getting out of a car is also a step into reality. Where she comes from, what she is up to, what she is thinking about at the moment - the viewer has to think about all this himself, the pictures leave room for dreams and ideas.
You can also dream elsewhere in the MAC Museum Art & Cars, currently Nobel cars from the 1920s and 1930s of the Berlin noble coachbuilder Erdmann & Rossi are on display, from the collection Saulius Karosas († 2019, once the richest Lithuanian).
The exhibition is accompanied by a coffee table book "Women in Cars"" (Bilder Fuchs, € 120).
