Bertrand Lavier

Mercedes-Benz 190, 1989

In Bertrand Lavier’s work painting as well as sculpture, both media discredited in the 20th century, returns each with its own means into the status of the an image as three-dimensional object. A representative work by Lavier is the Mercedes-Benz vehicle painted with transparent color coats, forming part of the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection. The work was developed as a part of Lavier’s exhibition in Hamburg (Deichtorhallen) 1991, where he painted over a big sailing boat. The outcome of this was the desire to work on another status symbol of luxurious mobility – in this case a black limousine. Lavier explicitly requested a car without motor and painted all its parts, even the wheels and wheel caps, so that the object is now detracted from its purpose at a double sense: the car is ‘put out of service’, transferred into an object of exposition, and it influences our desire for optic as well as haptic appropriation.