A World Within: Larry Warsh and KOZO Turn the Peninsula Fleet into a Moving Gallery
CART Department wraps six of The Peninsula London’s cars in an original KOZO work, on the streets through Frieze and all of October
The art car tends to live its life behind a rope. It gets commissioned, photographed, shown once, then settled into a collection as a sculpture nobody drives. Larry Warsh has spent years gathering exactly those objects, and his newest venture sends six of them back out into traffic.
“A World Within,” on view across London from 1 to 31 October and timed to Frieze, puts an original body of work by the Brooklyn artist KOZO across six of The Peninsula London’s signature vehicles. Two Rolls-Royce Phantoms, a Bentley Bentayga, a BMW i7, an electrified Austin taxi and an LEVC, the Peninsula’s first art fleet, carry a single continuous composition. The six read as one work, and every car stays in service, bookable by guests through the month, so the gallery moves through London with the public riding inside it.
Warsh built CART Department on the premise that a car can be more than transport. “I established CART Department to be a platform championing the intersection of cars, art and pop culture, viewing cars as evolved beyond utilitarian purpose into sculptural and conceptual art objects,” he says. The collection behind that idea now runs past 70 one-of-a-kind art cars by Keith Haring, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Lawrence Weiner, Rashid Johnson and Olafur Eliasson. KOZO, a tattoo innovator whose micro-realism reshaped both the fine-art and tattoo worlds, joins that lineage.
KOZO’s designs read as a paper tear, the Peninsula Pages peeling back the skin of each car to reveal a British pastoral scene underneath. Parkland, grazing animals and stately homes appear in the greens and ochres that echo Peninsula Green, threaded with the Peninsula’s Guardian Lions and landmarks like Wellington Arch. The three-dimensional landscape sits against the flatter, monochrome Pages, whose clean outlines carry a tattoo-flash graphic style, so the history being revealed stays distinct from the present-day figures discovering it. “The collection brings past and present into conversation, creating unexpected juxtapositions that allow history and myth to feel alive again, inviting the viewer to become part of the story, quite literally, by journeying within the Art Fleet,” KOZO says. The effect lets the Peninsula’s own history surface through the skin of a car still in daily use.
The surface set the terms. Over three months, KOZO conceived the work and applied it, starting from a digital sketch laid directly over photographs of each car, the finished art fabricated into a vinyl wrap by The Peninsula’s detailing experts at Topaz. “A car is not a blank white canvas; this project forced me to translate my language as a painter and tattoo artist onto a moving vessel,” he says. The distinct proportions of each model shaped the drawing at every turn. “Working with its existing colour, its curves, the shape of the hood, trunk and doors, and even small details like the side reflectors, all influenced my design choices. Every one of those must be accounted for and, ideally, worked into the composition rather than fought against.” The finished work had to read clearly on a surface always in motion.
Warsh traces the fit to what lives inside the building. The Peninsula’s relationship with the automobile runs nearly a century deep, back to a record order of Rolls-Royce Phantoms in Hong Kong. “The Peninsula London felt like the natural partner because of who they are at their core, with an incredible history and heritage that’s actually rooted in cars,” he says. He finds the evidence on the property, from the vehicles to the 8th floor. “They have an amazing fleet, and up on the 8th floor they’ve built this incredible car-themed restaurant that really celebrates their roots in a tasteful way.” Warsh’s history with the Peninsula predates this fleet, going back to a David Hockney BMW art car he once arranged to show at the hotel, the seed of what led here. He describes the result as things coming full circle.
Most art cars, people can’t ride in. They’re restrictive, sculptural objets, but now we’re creating something people can ride in style and elegance, synchronistic with Peninsula’s values.
Larry Warsh, founder of CART Department
Access is the whole argument for Warsh, who talks about the car as a way to carry art past the audience that already goes looking for it. “Cars are a great bridge between various audiences, and we can teach art with cars,” he says. The Peninsula brings a global, worldly audience, and Frieze week puts the work in front of the crowd most primed to notice. “We are trying to bring art to non-art audiences and tapping into various audiences, and this is a good example of that,” he says.
The work spends October beyond the reach of a fair booth, out on the street and in motion, free to anyone who books a ride. The art car has always been something to look at; Warsh and KOZO made one you can climb inside.
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