Cathy's Art Diary

Surprise event on Savill Row which placed a display of luxury cars on the main street for high end tailoring in London.   The display claimed to set up a concours or competition between tailoring and cars. I’m not a petrol head, in fact I don’t drive, but the cars looked beautiful in the sunshine and I viewed them as art objects. I must admit the whole thing stank of money.   There were various talks planned on a stage in the centre and there was a good brochure describing the cars and the tailors along the street. Car highlights for me included a 1934 Bentley racing car, a 1924 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost Piccadilly Roadster, a 2022 Morgan and a car used in the Kingsman films which seemed appropriate in that street. Closed 16 June 2022  

Confused exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at the design and influence of cars. I admit I don’t drive and can’t really tell one car from another except by colour so I suspected this might not be a show for me. It covered so many aspects of the subject from the design of cars themselves, to their effect on marketing, how they changed the landscape with more roads, their invention of mass production and their influence on design. If it had focused on just a few aspects it might have worked better. The design of the show itself was clever with the large cars around the edge and along the middle of the huge space and the display’s weaving their way around the rest of the space. I loved the way some of the displays were modeled on car bonnets and that any clothes were shown on crash test dummies. There were some lovely snippets in the show such as the handbag shown here which was designed for the Doge la Femme in 1955, aimed at women with a pale pink inter...

Novel installation at the Design Museum to commemorate 70 years of the Land Rover brand. For this work the atrium seats have been reupholstered with original materials used in Land Rovers from 1948 to now. The 18 cushions were arranged chronologically. I thought this work would have been more striking if the colours of the fabrics had been more exciting but on the whole they were dull blues and browns with only the Paul Smith design from 2017 standing out. From the floor of the foyer you could hardly see the cushions and from above they just blended together. Also a lot of the time people are sitting on them so they are hard to see but at least than means people were experiencing them. This was a nice idea but did feel like an advert for the company.

Stylish exhibition at the Design Museum looking at the history of the Ferrari company and its cars. OK I have to come clean that I know nothing about cars and hate Formula One racing so I did go into this with my “I’ll go and see anything“ hat on but I did enjoy it. The technology of the cars went over my head, but I loved the bits on the social history of the company and the cars were beautifully displayed and lit. The archive section at the start was fascinating with super photos of the factories plus early races. There was also a lovely wall of design drawings which I appreciated as art works if not technologically. I loved a video about the design of the body work and was amazed to see that the prototypes are modelled in clay so they can be developed in a very reactive way, being tested and tweaked without rebuilding. There was an example of a full size prototype with one side painted and the other side raw clay. There was a fun section with seats and steerin...

Fun exhibition at the London Film Museum of vehicles from the Bond films. I’m not a huge James Bond fan. I’ve seen most of the films but I’m not obsessive about them, but I did find this fun! There were lots of iconic vehicles such as Goldfinger’s Rolls Royce. There were also areas on different types of vehicle e such as an underwater section and a motorbike section. Lots of the vehicles were accompanied by video clips of them in action. It was well worth getting the audio tour as it was done by a stunt driver so you got some insight into how the cars had been used in the films, how many versions there were of some of the vehicles and just good stories behind them. I will say though if you are going to have an audio tour don’t also play loud music and film clips with sound as it all becomes too much! Review Evening Standard