Nick Veasey 1948 Mercury Cowboy For Sale
Nick Veasey
1948 Mercury Cowboy
Framed Chromaluxe
42.5 x 21 Inches
About this work
Nick Veasey has established himself as the foremost artist working with X-ray imaging, transforming industrial radiographic technology into a medium for revealing the hidden architecture of everyday objects. His work resides in major collections worldwide and has been exhibited extensively across Europe, Asia, and the United States. Veasey's practice emerged from commercial photography in the 1990s, evolving into a singular artistic vision that strips away surface appearances to expose the skeletal beauty beneath. 1948 Mercury Cowboy exemplifies Veasey's ongoing exploration of automotive subjects, a body of work that has garnered particular attention from collectors drawn to the intersection of mechanical engineering and visual poetry. The postwar Mercury, with its distinctive flowing lines and substantial chrome work, becomes something entirely other under Veasey's X-ray apparatus—the internal mechanisms, welds, and structural elements emerge as intricate networks of light and shadow against the characteristic blue-black field. The addition of the cowboy figure introduces a wry commentary on American mythology, the Western archetype rendered as vulnerable bone and sinew against the machine. Presented as a Chromaluxe print, the work achieves exceptional luminosity and archival stability, with the dye-sublimation process creating depth and saturation that conventional photographic printing cannot match. The framed presentation at 42.5 x 21 inches offers an immersive scale, though additional dimensions are available for collectors with specific spatial requirements. Veasey's X-ray works continue to perform strongly on the secondary market, reflecting sustained institutional and private interest in this technically demanding and visually distinctive practice. For acquisition inquiries regarding this work, please contact Guy Hepner in New York.
Price on Application
Edition & Provenance
- Medium
- Framed Chromaluxe
More from this series
Nick Veasey
1930’s Pontiac with Gangsters
Nick Veasey
1972 Porsche 911 Targa
Nick Veasey
1988 Ferrari F40 GTE
Nick Veasey
BanXsy After
Nick Veasey
BanXsy Before
Nick Veasey
Christian Louboutin, Pigalle Follies 1c1s
Nick Veasey
Cocktail?
Nick Veasey
Easy Listener
Nick Veasey
Hermes Birkin Bag
Nick Veasey
Hi-Fi Man
Nick Veasey
Rat Pack II
Nick Veasey
Rat Pack III
Nick Veasey
The Fly Away
Related Reading
About the X-Ray Works Series
Nick Veasey works across several distinct series, each applying his signature X-ray process to a different corner of the world we inhabit but rarely truly see.
His automotive works are among his most celebrated. Ferraris, Porsches, Land Rovers, and Volkswagen Campers are rendered in full radiographic detail, their engines, frames, and mechanical anatomy laid bare without a body panel in sight. These are not photographs of cars. They are portraits of what a car actually is underneath everything we are sold about it.
His collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum to X-ray Balenciaga couture produced some of the most forensically beautiful fashion images ever made. Garments that took hundreds of hours to construct are revealed stitch by stitch, their internal architecture as compelling as their exterior. His human figures carry the same quality — skeletal forms dressed, posed, and placed in scenes that are simultaneously clinical and deeply human.
A separate but equally significant strand of his practice uses lenticular printing — a ribbed lens technology that shifts the image depending on the viewing angle — to create works that move and transform as you walk past them. Clark Kent becomes Superman. A bartender shakes a cocktail. Batman and Superman collide. These pieces introduce humor, narrative, and kinetic energy into a practice that is otherwise defined by stillness.
His most recent series marks a departure into color. Silver silkscreen printed directly onto colored acrylic, the SilXscreens retain the X-ray aesthetic while introducing a vibrancy and warmth that opens the work to a new register entirely.
Flora, fauna, musical instruments, shoes, typewriters, and household objects appear throughout his catalog, each one transformed by the X-ray process from the familiar into something worth looking at properly for the first time. A flower becomes a diagram of itself. A pair of headphones becomes a study in engineering. The ordinary, made extraordinary simply by being seen from the inside out.
About Nick Veasey
Nick Veasey is a British artist born in London in 1962 whose practice occupies a space that no other artist has claimed quite so completely. Working from a custom-built, radiation-proof studio in Kent, England, he uses industrial X-ray equipment to expose the hidden interior of the world around us — cars, fashion, animals, instruments, the human body — producing images of extraordinary detail and haunting beauty that sit equally at home in science institutions and major fine art galleries.
His entry into the medium came by chance in 1996, when he was asked to X-ray a cola can for a television production. On the same day, he X-rayed the shoes he was wearing and showed the results to an art director. The response was immediate and galvanizing, and Veasey has never looked back. What followed was decades of relentless experimentation, collaboration with scientists, and the construction of a working practice that is as technically complex as it is visually compelling.
The work carries real conceptual weight. In a culture consumed by surface — by image, by appearance, by the carefully managed exterior — Veasey does the opposite. He strips it away entirely, revealing the inner architecture of things we think we know and exposing a beauty that exists only when the surface is removed. His X-rays do not create or transform. They reveal what was always there. The range of his subjects is broad and deliberate. Iconic automobiles including Ferrari and Porsche, Balenciaga couture from the Victoria and Albert Museum's permanent fashion collection, military hardware, musical instruments, flowers, and the human skeleton have all passed through his lead-lined studio. Each subject is treated with equal precision and equal curiosity. The result, across all of it, is work that manages to be simultaneously scientific and lyrical, factual and deeply strange.
His prints are produced on Chromaluxe, Diasec, and lenticular formats and issued in strict limited editions. His work has been acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of the British National Collection of Photography and has been exhibited across Europe, North America, and Asia. He is the recipient of awards from the IPA Lucie Awards, AOP, D&AD, Graphis, and Communication Arts, and was nominated for IPA Lucie International Photographer of the Year in 2008. Commercial collaborations have included Nike, Levi's, Adobe, Adidas, the BBC, and Porsche. His most recent work includes the SilXscreens series — silver silkscreen on colour acrylic — marking a significant new direction into colour after a practice long defined by monochromatic imagery.