Profile Airflow - Test Mold, Front End

£19,500 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books · No longer available

Claes Oldenburg's Statement on Profile Airflow (Claes Oldenburg: The Multiples Store, 1996, pp. 32-35): 'The Profile Airflow multiple, like the Tea Bag, is a relief superimposed over an image, though this time the relief is larger and far more complex in detail and fabrication. The Chrysler Airflow, which appeared in 1937, was the first "streamlined" car. It became the subject for many of my soft sculptures shown at the Sidney Janis Gallery in March 1966. In the course of the project I visited Carl Breer, the inventor of the Chrysler Airflow, in Detroit and studied a mammoth specimen of the automobile that he owned. I dissected the car into parts that would serve as sculptures – the radiator, the engine, the muffler, the dashboard, the tires, the doors, taillight, mudguards, etc. – and established three scales. The Airflow project at Gemini G.E.L., made three years later, was a kind of reprise in the media of reproduction, set in the industrial paradise of Los Angeles where, I discovered, Breer had been born. Two days after I arrived in Los Angeles to work at Gemini G.E.L. for the first time, I was presented with an actual Airflow, which happened to be maroon just like a toy Airflow I had owned as a child and, in addition, had the distinction of being the first automobile to have been driven over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. This car was then intensively photographed in preparation for what was to be a portfolio of prints and reliefs on different areas of the car,

• Binding: Hardcover

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