[Car Park: Members Only by Matej Andraž Vogrinčič  22m wide and 22m high was created and commissioned for the Telstra Adelaide Festival of Arts in 2000.]

• This public installation comprises 15,000 Matchbox toy cars stuck to a brick wall close to Rosina Street off Hindley Street, where it still remains as a crowd favourite. Many of the toy cars were given to the artist by the general public.

Slovenian artist Matej Andraž Vogrinčič (born October 12, 1970) comes from Ljubljana. Since the early 1990s, he has built an international reputation by creating site-specific installations in urban and natural environments filling ordinary or neglected places with even more ordinary objects.

• Vogrinčič first “dressed” a dilapidated house with donated clothing in Ljubljana and then presented a similar project at the Venice Biennale in 1999.
• The following year, he created the project “Car Park: Members Only” on a wall of a building in the South Australian capital of Adelaide (pictured above). Vogrinčič then went into the Australian outback where he put up a watering can installation, consisting of some 2,000 plaster watering cans arranged over the area of a football field in a region which is one of the driest on our planet.
• For the Awesome Festival in Perth, Western Australia (2003), Vogrinčič covered an area of 7,000 square metres with 10,000 coloured balloons and two years later in the Victorian capital he filled the atrium of the former Melbourne General Post Office (GPO) with 1,000 umbrellas.
• He commissioned Untitled for the 4th Liverpool Biennial (UK) which consisted of 56 upturned boats placed inside the bombed ruins of the Gothic Era St. Luke’s Church.
• In 2013, Vogrinčič participated in ‘Kashima’ in Beppu, Japan; working in collaboration with Japanese bamboo craft masters; creating a site-specific artwork, ‘Rope‘, in an abandoned hot-spring. Two years later, in 2015, he was invited to participate at the Contemporary Art Festival ‘Mixed Bathing World’ again in Beppu.

Back in 2000, on arriving in Adelaide, Vogrinčič  noticed the number of multi-level car parks in the city and its increasing urban density. “Adelaide is a capital of garages and car parks,” he explained. “I found a stenciled graffiti saying ‘Small Car: Members Only’ and decided to make a car park for really small cars.”

Hence the large or small “Car Park: Members Only”

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