Matthew Porter: Flying Cars at M+B gallery turns the American street into a stage for speed, nostalgia and controlled illusion. On view from July 25 to August 22, 2026, the exhibition continues Porter’s long-running “flying cars” series, in which vintage muscle cars appear to hover, leap or drift above highways, intersections and city blocks.
The images look spontaneous at first glance, but they are built with patience. Porter begins with photography, adds drawing and planning, then layers multiple exposures, overlays and digital adjustments until the final picture feels both familiar and impossible. The method matters as much as the result. Film serves as a working surface, not a passive record, and each image emerges from a sequence of decisions that pushes the photograph toward something closer to constructed cinema.
That tension between spectacle and method has defined Porter’s work for years. His cars, usually models from the 1960s and 1970s, carry a heavy charge of American memory: horsepower, adolescence, risk, freedom and a kind of midcentury fantasy of motion. Suspended above the street, they read like freeze-frames from a chase scene that never quite happened. The effect is not simply whimsical. It carries a bittersweet edge, as if the romance of the automobile had been lifted out of history and set under glass.
Porter’s background helps explain the precision. Born in 1975, he studied at Bard College and earned his MFA through the Bard-ICP program in New York. His work has appeared in major exhibitions and collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he has shown widely in galleries and institutions in the United States and abroad. Yet the “flying cars” remain his most recognizable images because they compress so many of his concerns into one frame: image construction, cultural memory and the uneasy line between what the eye accepts and what the mind resists.
At M+B, the series lands as a visual paradox, part urban landscape, part invented myth.
Image: Val Vista, 2024 © Matthew Porter
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