Machines
Engines, gadgets, instruments and invented contraptions, pictured as marvels, metaphors or working artworks.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
Machines have fascinated artists as marvels, threats, metaphors and working artworks. Renaissance engineers published them as spectacle: Agostino Ramelli's book of 1588 engraves water pumps, cranes and a rotating reading wheel. With industrialisation, painters turned to the engine's power, as in Charles Sheeler's gleaming locomotive wheels in Rolling Power (1939).
Around 1915 artists in the Dada orbit made machines into jokes about desire. Francis Picabia drew a young American girl as a spark plug, and Marcel Duchamp painted a Chocolate Grinder (1914) that reappears in The Large Glass. Others built machines. Nicolas Schöffer's CYSP 1 (1956) moved in response to sound and light, Jean Tinguely's Homage to New York (1960) shook, smoked and destroyed itself in a museum garden, and Panamarenko designed airships and flying contraptions that seldom left the ground. In a Nebraska farm shed, Emery Blagdon built wire and foil constructions he believed could heal.
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