Driving dynamics

Automotive designer Dilip Chhabria finds a new expression in art.

He designs cars for a living. And the rolling prototypes of the cars DC Design has done have been seen at top auto shows across the world. But Dilip Chhabria felt the need to go beyond making good-looking automobiles and create beauty for the sake of beauty. As he puts it, “Many cars are works of art in the purest sense, representing perhaps the defining physical art of the past 100 years.”

So we guess his new preoccupation was inevitable. “Andy Warhol’s phenomenal success on the subject of inanimate objects reinforced my convictions on the motor car subject, reckoning at the very least that the motor car is a far more emotive subject than most. The motor car has come to embody the notions of freedom, mobility and thrill and has shaped modern man socially, culturally and economically,” he says.

Early this year, Dilip Chhabria held an exhibition in Mumbai of the abstract paintings and sculptures he had done. As he says in his catalogue, “With my primary goal of evolving a very distinctly unique language, one that could be the basis of a strong identity in the abstract genre, the motor car depiction as a visual could not be obviously so, therefore the basis of the paintings and sculptures are the various angles and surfaces found in the motor car magnified 10 to 20 times... The line and form of my paintings and sculptures represent the industrialised process of the car.”

Here, then, is our choice of three paintings and three sculptures done by Dilip Chhabria, accompanied by his own notes.