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Zac Langdon-Pole’s Art Journey Constellations has taken him across a world that humans and birds have been navigating through millennia. He followed the flight paths of birds like the white stork or the arctic tern, traveling along the earth’s axis where the Northern and Southern Hemispheres’ summers intersect. Migrating birds cover some of the longest distances traveled by any living being. Their routes have guided the Polynesian pathfinders across the seas. Inspired by this ancient celestial tracing, the artist questions the position of humans as the center of the world. Weaving through Central Europe, Southern Africa, and the Pacific Islands of Samoa and Hawaii, he seeks to understand how culture intersects with the science of celestial mapping—and from there flows into larger existential inquiries about who we are and how we are situated in the world.
ZAC LANGDON-POLE (*1988, New Zealand) graduated from the University of Auckland, Elam School of Fine Arts and studied with Willem the Rooij at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. The recipient of the Charlotte-Prinz Scholarship exhibited in Canada, Singapore, and Germany. He lives in Darmstadt and Berlin, Germany.
The BMW Art Journey is a joint initiative of Art Basel and BMW that offers artists an opportunity to undertake a journey of creative discovery to a destination of their own choosing. Like a mobile studio, the BMW Art Journey can take an artist to almost anywhere in the world—to establish contacts, to forge perspectives, to envision and create new work. The BMW Art Journey is open to artists exhibited in the Discoveries sector of Art Basel in Hong Kong.
Twelve years after the first Benz patent motorcar Number 1 made its first journey in July 1886, a car raced across the image in Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s lithograph, The Automobilist. La 628-E8, a novel named after the license plate number of its author, Octave Mirbeau, was published in the early twentieth century. In his Futurist Manifesto, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti rated the beauty of a racecar’s revving engine and speed higher than the aesthetics of the Nike of Samothrace. Ever since its invention, artists have been examining the automobile, and the BMW Art Cars have played a central role here. Alexander Calder’s BMW 3.0 CSL from 1975 was the first in a series brought to life by Hervé Poulain, lover of auto racing and works of art, in collaboration with BMW’s head of motorsports, Jochen Neerpasch. Seventeen artists have since designed BMW models, and the “rolling sculptures” have not only proved themselves in museums, but also on the race track at Le Mans.
ARTISTS FEATURED (selection)
John Baldessari, Alexander Calder, Sandro Chia, Ken Done, Olafur Eliasson, Cao Fei, Ernst Fuchs, David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Michael Jagamara Nelson, Matazo Kayama, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Esther Mahlangu, César Manrique, A.R.Penck, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol
Twelve years after the first Benz patent motorcar Number 1 made its first journey in July 1886, a car raced across the image in Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s lithograph, The Automobilist. La 628-E8, a novel named after the license plate number of its author, Octave Mirbeau, was published in the early twentieth century. In his Futurist manifesto, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti rated the beauty of a racecar’s revving engine and speed higher than the aesthetics of the Nike of Samothrace. Ever since its invention, artists have been examining the automobile, and the BMW Art Cars have played a central role here. Alexander Calder’s BMW 3.0 CSL from 1975 was the first in a series brought to life by Hervé Poulain, lover of auto racing and works of art, in collaboration with BMW’s head of motorsports, Jochen Neerpasch. Seventeen artists have since designed BMW models, and the “rolling sculptures” have not only proved themselves in museums, but also on the race track at
Artists featured (selection): Alexander Calder, Sandro Chia, Ken Done, Olafur Eliasson, Ernst Fuchs, David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Michael Jagamara Nelson, Matazo Kayama, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Esther Mahlangu, César Manrique, A.R.Penck, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol
Twelve years after the first Benz patent motorcar Number 1 made its first journey in July 1886, a car raced across the image in Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s lithograph, The Automobilist. La 628-E8, a novel named after the license plate number of its author, Octave Mirbeau, was published in the early twentieth century. In his Futurist Manifesto, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti rated the beauty of a racecar’s revving engine and speed higher than the aesthetics of the Nike of Samothrace. Ever since its invention, artists have been examining the automobile, and the BMW Art Cars have played a central role here. Alexander Calder’s BMW 3.0 CSL from 1975 was the first in a series brought to life by Hervé Poulain, lover of auto racing and works of art, in collaboration with BMW’s head of motorsports, Jochen Neerpasch. Seventeen artists have since designed BMW models, and the “rolling sculptures” have not only proved themselves in museums, but also on the race track at Le Mans.
ARTISTS FEATURED (selection)
John Baldessari, Alexander Calder, Sandro Chia, Ken Done, Olafur Eliasson, Cao Fei, Ernst Fuchs, David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Michael Jagamara Nelson, Matazo Kayama, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Esther Mahlangu, César Manrique, A.R.Penck, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol