‘Gas Tank City’, a new monograph by Andrew Holmes, is a photorealist eye on the American West

Photorealism has a strong connection to the American West, a landscape of signs and shapes, logos and colours, utterly in thrall to the combustion engine with all the chrome-plated glamour and ennui that entails. Andrew Holmes is the latest in a long line of artists to find fascination with this rich iconography.

The London-based artist and academic not only has a longstanding connection to the city's Architectural Association (AA), but also a reputation as one of the leading contemporary photorealists. Gas Tank City is Holmes’ newest monograph, a compilation of drawings undertaken over half a century of travel to the heartland of American highway culture.

The monograph contains 100 of these drawings, all made using colour pencils on a large scale to create a seamless photorealist effect. Seventeen of the drawings go on display at the AA to accompany the publication, and the subject matter is both instantly evocative and impressively rendered.

From one perspective, Gas Tank City can be seen as a chronicle of a dying world, the gasoline-powered highways and freight routes that have come to embody the modern American West. It is a reflective realm of stainless steel trailers, chrome bumpers, massive trucks and a forest of signage. For a trained architect like Holmes, these spaces form a powerfully anti-designed landscape, an unplanned environment that’s nevertheless the result of countless design decisions.

As a result, the drawings have a special power, not just because of their technical mastery, but through their ability to freeze a moment in time, a chaotic swirl of juxtaposition, reflection and alignment that all comes together on the page. Necessarily, it is an artwork of fragments, of carefully chosen pieces of modernity assembled in just the right way, a highly disciplined act that starts with the physical immersion in the worlds depicted.

‘David Greene said I am a monk, but a monk in a car. If the car and the drawing board are my cell, I have spent more than 20 years alone in it,’ Homes writes. Gas Tank City is the result of this impressive period of devotion.

Andrew Holmes’ drawings are on show at the Front Members’ Room, The Architectural Association, 36 Bedford Square, London from 20 September – 7 December 2024, AAschool.ac.uk

Gas Tank City, Andrew Holmes, published by Circa Press, £75, Circa.Press. Also available at Amazon.co.uk