Gas Tank City

- Andrew Holmes is renowned for his hyper-real drawings of gleaming trucks, and the service infrastructure that sustains the city of Los Angeles

- Holmes has made it his life’s work to capture scenes from this uniquely American landscape in a series of drawings that now evoke a lost civilization

- Gas Tank City presents all 100 of Holmes’s Los Angeles drawings, created over the past 50 years - an astonishing body of work

- With commentaries by art historian Thomas E Crow, architects Mark Fisher and Cedric Price, and Holmes himself

Andrew Holmes is renowned for his hyper-real colored pencil drawings. His subject matter is the fixed and mobile service infrastructure that sustains the city of Los Angeles. The gleaming trucks, automobiles, and motorcycles that traverse the highways, and the industrial armature of storage tanks, service stations and truck stops to be found beyond the city’s edge are, for Holmes, the greatest artifacts of a society based on oil. Over the past 50 years, he has captured scenes from this uniquely American landscape in painstaking detail. Together they evoke a lost civilization. Gas Tank City presents 100 of Holmes’s Los Angeles drawings, along with commentaries by art historian, Thomas E Crow, architects Mark Fisher and Cedric Price, and Holmes himself.

Andrew Holmes (b. 1947) is Emeritus Professor of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University. He was formerly Guest Professor at the Technische Universitaat, Berlin, and a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute. For many years he was an innovative and inspiring tutor at the Architectural Association. He lives and works in London. Thomas E Crow is an American art historian and critic, best known for his influential writing on the role of art in modern society and culture. He is the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. Mark Fisher (1947-2013) was an English architect best known for his exuberant stage sets for the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics (2008), and performance artists including Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, Madonna and Elton John. Cedric Price (1934-2003) was an English architect and teacher whose influence cannot be overstated. His Fun Palace project, of 1964, inspired a generation of architects, and is one of the founding projects of the High Tech movement.