Profile
Commissions
Michael Sailstorfer, C111, 2011
Our collection concept also includes a small number of commissioned artworks. Some relate to the company’s product and some are part of the sculpture and wall paintings collections. One indicator of the future in this respect – and also an indicator of the early international direction taken by the Art Collection – was the commissioning of a series of artworks from Andy Warhol in 1986 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Mercedes-Benz AG. A second commission went to the New York artist Robert Longo, who created a sequence of five black-and-white ‘portraits’. The Stuttgart artist Simone Westerwinter created a ‘portrait’ of the company in 2001 with 60 watercolors of names and car types. Numerous other commissions have been undertaken since then. Sylvie Fleury created a series of six 3-channel video films for the Mercedes-Benz Center in Paris in 2006. Since the 1980s, commissions to design and realize location-specific artworks have gone to Max Bill, Heinz Mack, François Morellet, Walter De Maria, Ben Willikens, Tamara K.E., Gerold Miller, Pietro Sanguineti, Franz Erhard Walther, Jan van der Ploeg, Patricia London Ante Paris, Martin Gerwers, Andreas Schmid, Andreas Reiter Raabe, Stephane Dafflon and other artists. The Swiss artist Nic Hess, working with the Mercedes-Benz design department, created a large-scale installation for the ‘Galerie der Silberpfeile und Rennsportwagen’ in the Mercedes-Benz Museum to mark the 125th anniversary of the motor-car in 2011, and Michael Sailstorfer drew on the design practice of ‘morphing’ by using collage technique to convert a Mercedes 190 (W 201) into a roadworthy C111. In his film ‘CHZ’ (a cooperation between the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection and the Fondation Beyerle, Basel), the French artist Philippe Parreno connected a real temporary garden with a fictional cinematic staging.
Artworks
Publications
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BLITZEN BENZ BANG
Mixed Media, Sculptures, Commissioned Works in the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection
Hatje Cantz Ostfildern, 2009 -
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