WHEELS AND WAVES: THE RECEPTION

The Southsiders MC have included an art gallery in the Wheels & Waves concept, to celebrate the many visual artists who enrich our motorcycling world - photographers, sculptors, bike builders, musicians, etc.  Thursday night's kickoff party took place at Gallerie 13 Avril in Biarritz, a former paint factory, the old warehouse space underneath a residence built in a charming 19th Century southern France style, complete with an elderly tenant upstairs, who, while fascinated with the commotion on his small, normally quiet street, ultimately latched his wooden storm shutters to get some peace from the happy celebrants below.

This year's roster of artists included photographer Bill Phelps (featured previously on The Vintagent), painter/musician/preacher Brian Bent, Spanish photographer Alberto Garcia Alix, and photographer Alain Duplantier. El Solitario showed their latest Ducati-based custom, looking like nothing you've ever seen, and surely their best work to date. 

Surprise guests of the evening included the prototype BMW R90S built by Roland Sands (and recently debuted at Villa d'Este), accompanied by Roland himself, and Ola Stenegard, head of BMW motorcycle design.  Also on show, thanks to the foresight of Sebastien Lorentz, was the equally spectacular BMW R7 (also much discussed on The Vintagent).  More on the BMW show-up later...

The art was all top notch, the venue quirky enough to satisfy  everyone, and the hugely international crowd was thrilled to meet up.  BikeExif's Chris Hunter arrived from New Zealand, plus Jordan Kightley from the Gentleman Racer rides and  Sydney Cafe Racers, plus lots of Americans/Brits/Dutch/German etc riders.  Next: Friday's ride and illegal sprint race!

CONRAD LEACH: 'UNITED STATE'

Painter Conrad Leach is having a show in Los Angeles this month (Feb 9 - Arp 19, 2013), at the new Subvecta Motus Gallery.  Here's what I wrote in the exhibition catalog:

"Conrad Leach is wrestling the angel of Art on the Bonneville Salt Flats.  He’s been at it for 15 years, and is winning, fixing on canvas a transcendent vision of the noisy, dangerous and highly romantic struggle of a certain type of character, willing to risk all for a worthless wreath of laurel.  While painters have grappled with motorization since Turner’s ‘Rain, Steam, and Speed’ of 1844, few have made it their career, fewer still push past the nostalgia and kitsch which ruin the genre.  Ignoring all that, Leach’s interior dig, to access that gnawing crux of Meaning, brings us unironically to the realm of signs and icons.  His technique is super-cool, but his blood is burning; like the heroes he paints, he’s in it.

Leach has chosen Los Angeles for his US solo painting début, for this place, perfumed with gasoline vapor and scrubbed-off rubber, designed exclusively for, reliant on, and despairing of the internal combustion engine more than anyplace on earth, has clutched the Wheel to its tarmac heart, squeezing out speed, distorting the vehicle’s very shape in the loving, where all manner of lovechildren -bastard little hotrod freaks- are born.  Conrad Leach is the portrait painter of such beasts, and such men."

Subvecta Motus Gallery is owned by Justin Kell of Glory Sales and Service, and is curated by MOCA veteran Stacie B London; both are fine art professionals with deep roots in motorcycling, although the gallery isn't 'about' motoring...they just like Conrad's paintings!

Subvecta Motus: 518 West Garfield Ave, Glendale CA

Contact: Subvecta Motus Gallery, 323 454-7650, info@subvecta.com