The Art Center of Château la Coste in Provence will be home to Dylan’s largest sculpture to date, the ‘Rail Car’, which will be permanently on display.
In Provence, France, a metalworking artwork created by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was revealed.
Rail Car, the renowned artist’s largest work of art to date, is now a permanent feature of the 600-acre Chateau La Coste sculpture park.
Dylan‘s past is evoked through the installation of a Rail Car on train tracks.
In his book Chronicles: Volume One, he recollected his experiences with trains, noting that from the time he was a child, railroad cars inspired a sense of safety in him. He recalled, “I’d seen and heard trains from my earliest childhood days and the sight and sound of them always made me feel secure. The big boxcars, the iron ore cars, freight cars, passenger trains, Pullman cars. There was no place you could go in my hometown without at least some part of the day having to stop at intersections and wait for the long trains to pass.”
What was the process for creating the sculpture?
Around 7 tonnes of iron have been put together to construct the “Rail Car”.
Dylan has included a WIIX 723 double-door boxcar, previously used for transporting paper rolls for Willamette Industries, an Oregon-based timber and paper enterprise, into his artwork.
In the summer of 2019, Dylan started to work on the sculpture, which necessitated the involvement of engineers from both France and America.
This art piece was initially conceived in Los Angeles, and then taken apart and sent to France where it was displayed in Chateau La Coste.
Dylan states that the sculpture is meant to embody “calm, tranquility, and stillness”.
