Alvaro Barrington Wants Aspiring Artists To ‘Trust Your People’ An interview at Frieze Seoul

By Grace Banks

[...] Seoul’s art fans enjoyed being introduced to one New York export in particular, Alvaro Barrington. “His work has always excited me” one fair attende told Forbes at the opening of Barrington’s collaboration with BMW’s Art Car collection curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, “to see his work in person is what fairs like Frieze are all about”. It was the first time Barrington exhibited at Frieze Seoul, showing new miniatures specially created for the fair, including Star Trek: the Kiss and GTA Miami (side). Interested in the idea of cars as the ultimate mobiliser, Barrington wanted to explore Star Trek as the first stage of today’s tech industry. Here, he speaks about Seoul as a city of the future, learning to drive at 10 years old, and his advice to young artists.

Grace Banks: I visited your Tate Britain commission, Grace, a couple of weeks ago and the huge scale of it reminds me of how you’ve subverted the proportions of these cars, giving them an almost emotional feel.

Alvaro Barrington: The thing we forget about cars is that they’re a space of intimacy, they really are. They’re intimate and they’re mobilising. I wanted to take the shape of the i7 and use that idea of a miniature as its own ecosystem, a place for intimacy.

Then I thought about moments in the 1960s when ideas of technology felt aspirational, TV shows like Star Trek and the Star Trek Voyager, these were cultural moments that shaped tech, which is something I’ve been reading about a lot. They were radical – the first interracial kiss happened on Star Trek, so that’s why I painted that on the car. That's what I wanted to do with The Kiss, show the intimacy in cars that people might not have noticed.

[...]

You’ve spoken before about being inspired by Rauschenberg’s work with cars.

Rauschenberg’s is the one that sticks out to me the most, he's kind of my north star. I think his exploration of where the world was going, you know those iconic works from the 1960s about space exploration. We forget about cars and the space of intimacy that provide. But to me, they’ve almost been sort of romantic.