This Mercedes Benz is a Wreck, as its name tells us. It is made from literaly thousands of small pieces of mirrors from stainless steel. Artist Jordan Griska created it to reflect both luxury and mortality. Everything, no matter how expensive will eventually find its end.
This life size automobile statue is a great copy of a real Mercedes Benz S550 specially created by printing a 3D model of the car and editing it with digital manipulation softwares. The purpose was to translate the luxury and expensiveness of a car into a broken piece of art, without losing the similarity to the original car design on which it was based.
The car looks like it has just got out of a crash and that’s the idea. Griska have studied countless of images online and images of car accidents and constructed this stunning sculpture by mirrored pieces-precisely laser cut to seamlessly fit together.
The sculpture depicts the highlight of today’s vehicle industry. It was made using digital technology and hard handcraft work just like all the cars that are being made today, but, at the same time, it shows our utopian dreams and what the reality has to offer. More info: jordangriska.com | philadelphiacontemporary.org
The artist based in Brooklyn draws inspiration from the themes of Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”, meaning luxury and wreckage going hand in hand with a very blurred line between them.
Griska is also influenced by Andy Warhol’s coloured “car crash” serigraphs, mixing both the digital and physical worlds, and the sterile nature of stainless steel mirrors with the weird disorder of the fragmented automobile.
Eventually, this sculpture captures the double nature of American culture: wealth, freedom and individuality merged with decadence, debauchery and tailspin.
They’re all just sides of the same coin and these kind of art makes us more aware of something that is happening all around us.
So, what is it, from your point of view, the most striking about this Mercedes Benz S550? Is it the luxury, the mirrors, the jewellery kind of look or do you see just a crashed car?
[the_ad id=”71924″]
[the_ad id=”83004″]
All images by jordan griska and philadelphia contemporary
