Leonardo Da Vinci was credited with sketching the world’s first self-propelled vehicle back in 1478. But da Vinci was a Renaissance Man, a man at ease in front of a religious scene to paint as much as in front of a technological challenge. There’s no artist from the Renaissance in the exhibition, the majority of the works exhibited come from the last two decades but they demonstrate that contemporary artists do not need to graduate as engineers to re-invent the car… even if the result of their experimentation has no ambition to compete with what comes out of a Porsche factory

At the beginning of the 20th century, cars were hand built by small teams of highly skilled craftsmen and women. Only a small elite could afford to buy one until Henry Ford developed a system of mass-producing automobiles that lowered the unit price and enabled the average consumer to buy a car.

Tobias Rehberger takes history backwards. In 1999, the artist embarked on a project that saw him sending simple sketches, composed essentially from memory, of iconic cars such as a Porsche 911 and a McLaren F1 to a workshop in Thailand

Cars have shaped the 20th century probably more than any other product of technology. Ever since Carl Benz created the first “horseless carriage” (1885), the automobile has had a deep impact on almost every single aspect of our life: landscapes, architecture, geo-political relationships (necessity to gain control of the areas that produce its fuel), social and labour movements, even the air we breathe