Jonny Ambrose opens camouflage themed car art show in Coventry

A camouflage theme in the heart of the British car industry

A new solo show at Coventry's Herbert Art Gallery and Museum turns the disguise wraps used on secret prototype cars into the subject of fine art. Titled INNOVATION, CAMOUFLAGE AND DISCOVERY, the exhibition by British automotive artist Jonny Ambrose opened on 10 November and runs to 5 December 2026 at the gallery on Jordan Well, Coventry CV1 5QP. Entry is free.

Ambrose has built the show around a simple idea. The swirling vinyl patterns that manufacturers wrap over test mules to hide a new car's shape, and the dazzle camouflage Britain's wartime Camouflage Directorate painted onto vehicles and ships, are both exercises in hiding something in plain sight. He has turned that visual language into bold geometric artworks of cars and circuits, each one built from repeating patterns that reward a longer look.

The works draw their subjects from Coventry and Warwickshire's car scene past and present. They include pieces built around bespoke manufacturers CALLUM, Twisted and Tolman, Maeving's electric motorcycles, the Warwick Moto student race team at the University of Warwick, Coventry University's National Transport Design Centre, Coventry Transport Museum and the British Motor Museum. The show sits inside the Herbert, next to its permanent Dippy the Diplodocus display and near the touring British Art Show 10, which stays up until January 2027, so visitors arrive for one thing and often find three.

From wartime disguise to a design studio's secrets

Ambrose has made automotive art since 1994, more than three decades of painting and sculpting cars for collectors and brands. For this body of work he builds each image as a 3D and 2D composition on a computer, drawing every line himself rather than generating any part of it with AI, before it becomes a finished print or panel.

He has said Coventry remains the heart of the British car industry even though much of its current innovation stays hidden from public view, effectively camouflaged, until a manufacturer is ready to reveal it. That is the gap his paintings try to close, turning the industry's secrecy itself into the picture rather than waiting for the unveiling.

The Coventry show follows close on a solo run for Ambrose at the Royal Automobile Club's Art of Motoring exhibition in London, which closed shortly before this one opened.

Following it from India

There is no India leg to this show and the Herbert is a free walk in gallery in the English Midlands, so the realistic way to follow it from Mumbai or Bengaluru is online. The gallery lists current exhibitions on its own website, and Ambrose posts his automotive work through his own site and social pages, where readers can see the camouflage series without a flight to Coventry.

The theme should land easily for an Indian audience that already spots disguised test mules on its own highways. Mahindra, Tata and other brands regularly send prototypes out in India wrapped in exactly this kind of swirling vinyl, ahead of a launch. Ambrose's show simply asks viewers to stop and look at that familiar camouflage as a picture in its own right, rather than a clue to guess the car underneath.

Sources