joshua vides turns petersen into a rundown garage
At Petersen Car Museum in LA, Joshua Vides has converted a gallery of cars on a walk black and white plan.
The Los Angeles-based artist’s exhibition, Flat Out: The Art of Joshua Vides, takes over the Armand Hammer Foundation Gallery with five hand-painted vehicles, stacks of tires, gas pumps, wall graphics and oversized garage signage, all rendered in his clean monochrome line.
The space reads at first like an auto body shop stripped of paint. A sign for Vides Auto Body hangs over an arched opening, checkered flags cross the ceiling and a blunt NO PARKING graphic stretches the wall.
The familiar artifacts of car culture are still there, but Vides flattens them into something closer to a full-scale sketch, using black lines to trace seams, shadows, panels and edges on every surface. Flat Out will be available until July 5, 2027.
images © Petersen Automotive Museum
joshua vides brings ‘reality to idea’ to Petersen
For artist Los Angeles-based Joshua Vides Flat Out expands a body of work he calls Reality into Idea. His approach is direct in method and strange in effect. Real objects are overlaid with white paint and then highlighted with clean black lines that locate edges, shadows, seams, and surface breaks.
The work keeps the object fully present while giving it the visual quality of a sketch, somewhere between gallery object and hand drawn image.
In Petersen, this language is extended from individual objects to a complete environment. Vides spent nine days hand-painting the five vehicles along with the gallery walls and garage elements, shaping the space into a monochromatic car set.
The museum notes that its past collaborations include names like Nike, Converse, Fendi, Google and G-Shock, but here the scale changes. The car becomes one canvas among many, held within a larger design that visitors can walk through.
Joshua Vides transforms a Petersen Automotive Museum gallery into a black and white mechanics garage
cars become designs without losing their weight
Throughout Flat Out, Joshua Vides’ vehicles retain their natural weight even when their surfaces are visually flattened. A Ferrari seen from behind has been reduced to thick outlines around the taillights, air vents, license plate and rear window.
A Mercedes sits beneath the blunt NO PARKING typography, its grille and body sharpened by the same paint line used on the surrounding pumps and tires. Elsewhere, a low coupe draws the eye through layers of foreground silhouettes, as if the entire room has become a story frame.
The gallery’s reflective floor adds another layer to the illusion. Black lines double under the cars and white body panels dissolve into the pale ground.
The walls feature oversized contours that make the architecture read like a flattened backdrop, while framed window graphics mimic the diagonal marks of glass reflections. Even the stacks of tires bear repeating tread marks, turning a utilitarian garage item into a design.
five vehicles are hand-painted with clean outlines as part of Flat Out: The Art of Joshua Vides
flat out: mechanic’s garage inside the museum
The installation works because it uses the visual grammar of car culture without treating vehicles as distant icons. Vides draws from the everyday space around the car, the repair shop, the body shop, the pump, the tire pile and gives these details the same status as the cars themselves. The garage becomes part of the work, with its own marks, edges, jokes and visual rhythm.
As part of Petersen’s larger collection, Flat Out offers a different way to look at car design. Rather than leaning solely on finish, rarity or performance, the report asks what happens when a vehicle’s surface is translated by hand. Body lines, headlights, air vents and spoilers become marks. The car is still there, but its identity now depends on the viewer’s drawing, memory and movement through space.
black outlines trace body panels, headlights, vents and glass to flatten each vehicle into a graphic composition
a Vides Auto Body sign places the fictional garage at Petersen’s address on Wilshire Avenue
