five hand-painted cars fill joshua vides’ monochromatic garage at the petersen
joshua vides turns the petersen into a drawn garage
At the Petersen Automotive Museum in LA, Joshua Vides has turned a gallery of cars into a walk-in black-and-white drawing.
The Los Angeles-based artist’s exhibition, Flat Out: The Art of Joshua Vides, takes over the Armand Hammer Foundation Gallery with five hand-painted vehicles, tire stacks, gas pumps, wall graphics, and oversized garage signage, all rendered in his crisp monochrome linework.
The space reads at first like an auto body shop stripped of color. A sign for Vides Auto Body hangs above an arched opening, checkered flags run across the ceiling, and a blunt NO PARKING graphic stretches across the wall.
The familiar objects of car culture are still there, but Vides flattens them into something closer to a full-scale sketch, using black lines to trace seams, shadows, panels, and edges across every surface. Flat Out will be on view until July 5th, 2027.
images © Petersen Automotive Museum
joshua vides brings ‘reality to idea’ to the petersen
For artist Joshua Vides, who is based in Los Angeles, Flat Out extends a body of work he calls Reality to Idea. His approach is direct in method and strange in effect. Real objects are coated in white, then marked with crisp black lines that trace edges, shadows, seams, and surface breaks.
The work keeps the object fully present while giving it the optical quality of a sketch, somewhere between showroom object and hand-drawn image.
At the Petersen, that language expands from individual objects into a full environment. Vides spent nine days hand-painting the five vehicles along with the gallery walls and garage elements, shaping the space into a monochrome automotive set.
The museum notes that his past collaborations include names such as Nike, Converse, Fendi, Google, and G-Shock, but here the scale shifts. The car becomes one canvas among many, held inside a larger drawing that visitors can walk through.
Joshua Vides turns a Petersen Automotive Museum gallery into a black-and-white mechanic’s garage
cars become drawings without losing their weight
Throughout Flat Out, Joshua Vides’ vehicles keep their physical heft even as their surfaces are visually flattened. A Ferrari seen from behind is reduced to thick outlines around its taillights, vents, license plate, and rear glass.
A Mercedes sits beneath the blunt typography of NO PARKING, its grille and bodywork sharpened by the same hand-painted linework used on the surrounding pumps and tires. Elsewhere, a low coupe catches the eye through layers of foreground silhouettes, as if the whole room has become a storyboard frame.
The gallery’s reflective floor adds another layer to the illusion. Black lines double beneath the cars, and white body panels dissolve into the pale ground.
The walls carry oversized borders that make the architecture read like a flattened backdrop, while framed window graphics mimic the diagonal marks of glass reflections. Even the stacks of tires carry repeated tread marks, turning a utilitarian garage object into pattern.
five vehicles are hand-painted with crisp outlines as part of Flat Out: The Art of Joshua Vides
flat out: a mechanic’s garage inside the museum
The installation works because it uses the visual grammar of car culture without treating the vehicles as distant icons. Vides draws from the everyday space around the automobile, the repair bay, the body shop, the pump, the tire pile, and gives those details the same status as the cars themselves. The garage becomes part of the work, with its own signs, edges, jokes, and visual rhythm.
Within the Petersen’s larger collection, Flat Out offers a different way to look at automotive design. Instead of leaning into finish, rarity, or performance alone, the exhibition asks what happens when a vehicle’s surface is translated by hand. Body lines, headlights, vents, and spoilers become marks. The car is still there, but its identity now depends on drawing, memory, and the viewer’s movement through space.
black outlines trace body panels, headlights, vents, and glass to flatten each vehicle into a graphic composition
a Vides Auto Body sign places the fictional garage at the Petersen’s address on Wilshire Boulevard
the gallery floor reflects the painted cars and doubles the installation’s comic-style linework
tire stacks, gas pumps, and auto body signage are drawn into the same monochrome language
project info:
name: Flat Out
artist: Joshua Vides | @joshuavides
museum: Petersen Automotive Museum | @petersenmuseum
location: Los Angeles, California, USA
dates: June 20th — July 5th, 2026
photography: © Petersen Automotive Museum
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