The exhibition brings together around 30 gouaches and drawings with a focus on visionary urban spaces and urban utopias. The recently completed documentary film about the works, inspiration and biography of the artist, who was born in 1933, can also be seen.
Architect of a formative film generation
Syd Mead helped shape the idea of an entire generation of how high-tech cities could look and function in the future – he was instrumental in the look of city settings in films such as “Star Trek: The Movie”, “Blade Runner”, “Aliens” , “Tron” or “Elysium”. For them, the artist, who called himself a “visual futurist”, not only developed the architecture, but also entire mobility concepts with flying cars, autonomous vehicles and spaceships.
From industrial designer to visionary
“Star Trek: The Movie” was the first science fiction film in 1978 that Mead worked on – previously he had created groundbreaking designs as an industrial designer for companies such as Ford, Chrysler, Philips Electronics and Sony.
In 1982 “Blade Runner” by director Ridley Scott was released. The cult film is set in 2019 in a gloomy, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, the scenario of which was designed by Mead – unlike in his previously created urban utopias, according to the exhibition organizers, he drew an urban nightmare and concrete cosmos that resembles a hell turned stone.
Documentary about life’s work
The exhibition in the Graz Museum is showing the artist’s work in a solo exhibition for the first time in Austria, said museum director Otto Hochreiter at the presentation on Monday. The show, which was previously shown in Berlin and Kriens in Switzerland, was developed by the German-Austrian architecture firm Ortner & Ortner Baukunst: It shows a selection of Mead’s convincingly realistic drawings and gouaches, the drafts for the film settings as well as works for Include principals such as automakers and transportation companies.
The works cover a period from the 1970s to 2004. In a short documentary film that was made for the exhibition, the artist talks about his design projects and his life – shortly before the film designer was 86 years old on December 30, 2019 in California died after a long period of cancer.
Review and preview
In terms of content, the compact Graz show is linked to the exhibition “Unbuilt Graz. Architecture for the 20th Century ”, which also deals with ideas and visions that were never realized, says Hochreiter – more on this in Graz-Design in and for the Museum (July 30th, 2020). At the same time, it is used as a “prelude” to the exhibition “The city as a data rock. How we want to live in the future ”, which will be on view in spring 2021.
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