|
Price |
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-- |
Production |
|
1 |
|
Engine |
8
liter W16 |
Weight |
-- |
|
Aspiration |
quad
turbochargers |
Torque |
1106
lb-ft |
|
HP |
1200
hp @ 6400 rpm |
HP/Weight |
-- |
|
HP/Liter |
150
hp per liter |
1/4 mile |
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|
0-62 mph |
2.6
seconds |
Top Speed |
255
mph |
(from Bugatti Press
Release) Bugatti presents the fastest artwork ever
Exclusive exhibition of Bernar
Venet’s interpretation of the Bugatti Grand Sport
during the Art Basel Miami Beach at the Rubell Family Collection
Molsheim, France/Miami –
December 3, 2012. French artist Bernar Venet has been invited by
Bugatti, legendary supercar-maker, to create a work of art that
combines the artist’s vision and passions with Bugatti’s celebrated
Grand Sport. Through a congenial synthesis of artistic concept and
technical possibilities, Venet has created an object that integrates
the symbol of speed with a fascinating, painterly exterior and an
interior that alludes to haute couture. This one-of-a-kind
sculptural work will be on view at the Rubell Family Collection in
Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach.
Bernar Venet remarks, “A
Bugatti is already a work of art in itself, one that transports both
its beholder and its driver into new dimensions of reality. I
realized how I could translate my passion for mathematical equations
and scientific treatises into three-dimensional form. My works are
usually
self-referential. So I found the idea of translating the equations
of the Bugatti engineers onto the
bodywork of the car very appealing. It was, so to speak, a logical
conclusion and a new challenge in
terms of the specific form of collaboration and implementation. To
me, the result is also exceptional
when measured by artistic standards and bestows the object with a
mythical character.”
The artistic
avant-gardes of the first half of the twentieth century found
inspiration in the car as an
object of desire; they depicted it in drawings, paintings and
sculptures that projected absolute speed
as their point of orientation. In the 1970s, the car served as an
unconventional canvas for many artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg,
Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, who painted what became known as
“art cars”. This practice continued to be embraced in the 1980s.
Since the 1990s,
international artists have concentrated on exploring the shifting
cultural historical
significance of the car. This has resulted in sculptural and
conceptual responses such as those by
Erwin Wurm, Gabriel Orozco, Christoph Keller, Olafur Eliasson and
Damian Ortega, which tend to contextualize the car as a paradigm for
the acute social and cultural changes of a globalized world.
Bernar Venet´s approach
is radically different from these movements and art works. He takes
on the
Bugatti Grand Sport by selecting a totally original solution, which
distinguishes itself from the more
traditional work of his predecessors. The application of
mathematical formulae calculating the
enormous power of the Bugatti engine on the car itself, allows him
to implement the self-referential
character inherent for his paintings. In doing so he pays tribute to
the genius of technological science
as well as the German Know-How of automobile production.
In his 2012 artistic
adaptation and exploration of the Bugatti Grand Sport Bernar Venet
has combined image and object to highlight the fascination with this
model’s absolute beauty and speed. His work unites a conceptual
approach and sculptural craft on equal footing. In this work for
Bugatti, Venet links the Pop artists’ claim to the car as a canvas
with the utilization of every technical and aesthetic means
available for designing the fastest and costliest car in the world
today. Venet incorporates signs taken from the realm of production
into his visual idiom and creates a total work of art that
harmonizes object and outer surface, interior and exterior, and
evokes the exhilarating speed of the Bugatti Grand Sport.
Achim Anscheidt, Chief
Designer at Bugatti, states, “Our collaboration with Bernar Venet,
one of the most demanding artists of our time, has led to creative
impulses and inspiration that will continue to motivate us in the
fields of concept and design. We are pleased that this collaboration
has resulted in the creation of a significant, collectible work of
art. The self-image of the Bugatti brand derives from an artistic
identity that unites sketch, drawing, technical planning and
realization into an intermedial whole. Bernar Venet doubly honors
our brand by making reference to the technical formulae of our
engineers without fully revealing their secrets. It is an homage to
the principle of dialogue and to the human capacity to question and
redefine established boundaries. Venet is always focused on the
essentials and so is Bugatti.”
The Rubells have a long
history with the artist, and Mera Rubell notes, “Our friendship with
Bernar
Venet began in the mid-1970s. Our young families bonded over dinners
and great conversations in
his SoHo loft. The children played and the adults engaged in endless
talk about contemporary art.
Don [Rubell] and Bernar have always shared an obsession with the
beauty and complexities of
mathematics. When we met Bernar he was already an accomplished
artist and a very intuitive
collector of emerging art. We benefitted from his generous insight
into the artist’s perspective and
his artwork has been part of our collection since the 1970s.
Bernar’s life-long, signature obsession
with mathematical formulas has found a ready-made canvas on the
Bugatti, which is both original
and dynamic. We’re proud to present the Venet/Bugatti collaboration
at our Foundation’s museum.”
About Bernar Venet
Born in France and based
in New York, Bernar Venet is one of the most influential
contemporary
sculptors of our time. During the summer of 2011, Venet unveiled his
monumental sculptures in a solo exhibition at the Château de
Versailles in France, becoming one of only five contemporary artists
to be given the honor.
From 1961 to 1963, he
covered canvases in tar; his notoriety from this period was further
established after his installation of a sculpture without any
specific form, composed only of a Pile of Coal heaped onto the
floor. Originally known for his early radical gestures, Venet moved
from Nice to New York in 1966 where, over the course of the
following four decades, he has continued to explore painting,
poetry, film, and performance. He is known for creating abstract
pieces that make reference to the language of mathematical concepts
and scientific theories, bridging pure science as a subject for art
and introducing the concept of “monosemy”. His capacity for
intellectual abstraction and his taste for pure reason and
experimentation led him to the Conceptual Art Movement of which he
is one of the most prominent figures.
He represented France at
the 1974 São Paulo Biennial, and also participated in the 1977
Documenta
VI in Kassel. 1979 marked a turning point in Venet’s career, when he
began a series of wood reliefs,
Arcs, Angles, Diagonals, and created the first of his Indeterminate
Lines. That same year, he was
awarded an artist grant by the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 1994, Jacques Chirac,
then the Mayor of Paris, invited Venet to present twelve sculptures
from
his Indeterminate Lines series on the Champs de Mars, which
afterwards developed into a world tour
in Asia, Europe, South and North America. To celebrate the
establishment’s bicentennial in 2007,
Bernar Venet was chosen by the French Ministry of Culture to paint
the ceiling of the Palais
Cambon at the Cour des Comptes in Paris. In May of 2010, President
Nicolas Sarkozy inaugurated
9 Lignes obliques, a 30-meter tall sculpture to celebrate the 150th
anniversary of Nice's reunification
with France.
Venet is represented in
many important public and private collections all over the world,
including The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), and the
Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles). In recent years, important
retrospectives of the artist’s work have been mounted in Germany,
Hungary, France, Spain and South Korea. After the 2009 Venice
Biennale, where 1,200 square meters were dedicated to the
installation of his steel Arcs, Venet is returning to the Biennale
in 2013, this time with the intention of highlighting his works on
canvas.
Venet has been the
recipient of several distinguishing honors such as France’s
Commandeur des Arts
et des Lettres and Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, and is also a
member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. In 2013, Venet
will be awarded the international Julio Gonzaléz Prize by the
IVAM in Valencia.
About the Rubell Family Collection
The Rubell Family
Collection (RFC) was established in 1964 in New York City, shortly
after its
founders Donald and Mera Rubell were married. It is now one of the
world’s largest, privately
owned contemporary art collections.
In Miami, Florida, since
1993, the RFC is exhibited within a 45,000-square-foot repurposed
Drug
Enforcement Agency confiscated goods facility. The museum and its
sculpture garden are publicly
accessible. The Contemporary Arts Foundation (CAF) was created in
1994 to expand the RFC’s
public mission inside the paradigm of a contemporary art museum.
The collection is
constantly expanding and features such well-known artists as
Jean-Michel Basquiat,
Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Neo Rauch, Cindy Sherman,
Kara Walker and Andy Warhol. In addition to displaying
internationally established artists, the RFC actively acquires,
exhibits and champions emerging artists working at the forefront of
contemporary art.
Each year the Foundation
presents thematic exhibitions drawn from the collection with
accompanying catalogs. These exhibitions often travel to museums
around the world. In 2011–12, 30 Americans was presented at the
Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Chrysler Museum of
Art in Norfolk, Virginia, and the North Carolina Museum of Art in
Raleigh, North Carolina. Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection
were at the Fundación Banco Santander in Madrid, Spain in 2012. Time
Capsule, Age 13-21: The Contemporary Art Collection of Jason Rubell
is currently at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Other
exhibitions have been presented at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Palm
Springs Art Museum in California and North Carolina Museum of Art.
Sponsors for recent exhibitions have included Bank of America, Puma,
Audi, Lanvin and Dedon.
The Foundation has been
recognized as a pioneer in what is often referred to as the “Miami
model,”
whereby private collectors create a new, independent form of public
institution. The Foundation also maintains an internship program, an
ongoing lecture series and an extensive artwork loan program to
facilitate exhibitions at museums around the world. Its ongoing
partnership with Miami-Dade County Public Schools enables thousands
of schoolchildren to visit and have educational programming inside
the Foundation every year. In addition, the Foundation has a public
research library containing over 40,000 volumes and a comprehensive
contemporary art bookstore.
About Bugatti
Art – Forme – Technique:
these are the brand values that laid the road map for Ettore Bugatti
and
that continue to provide the trajectory for Bugatti Automobiles
today. Ettore was born into a family
of artists: his father was a respected sculptor and furniture
designer and studied at the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts of Paris, while his brother, Rembrandt, was a significant
sculptor whose work was
exhibited at the Venice Biennale, among other venues. Ettore
initially began his career by studying
art at the Brera Art School in Milan before he dedicated himself to
the art of engineering. In 1909,
the young Ettore set up his own car manufacturing atelier in
Molsheim, in Alsace, France. Art
continued to influence him; he required his cars to be works of art
and the design of his motors,
wheels, and the controls in his cockpits derived from the formal
vocabulary of the art of his time
(Braque, Léger, Duchamps, Delaunay). He repeatedly experimented with
new materials and
repeatedly pushed himself and his cars on to new peaks of
performance. Many of the models that he
designed wrote racing history.
In 1998, Bugatti
Automobiles revived the company, which had ceased operations in
1956, and they
also oriented themselves according to this brand DNA: with the
Veyron 16.4 and its derivatives, the
Super Sport, Grand Sport and Vitesse, they not only created the
fastest and most technologically
advanced super sports cars, but also an unmistakable, timeless
design in which Bugatti’s brand values come alive once more.
The Bugatti Grand Sport
Venet will be exhibited from Wednesday, December 5 through Sunday,
December 9, 2012, during Art Basel Miami Beach at the Rubell Family
Collection, 95, NW 29th Street, Miami, FL, 33127. Opening hours:
9:00 am – 6:00 pm
