The 20th BMW Art Car is being presented to the public at the Centre Pompidou in Paris for the first time.
Designed by New York artist Julie Mehretu, the project transforms the BMW M Hybrid V8 race car continuing a tradition of BMW Art Cars in competitive racing.
Following its world premiere in the French capital, the newest BMW Art Car will compete in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
“The whole BMW Art Car project is about invention, imagination, pushing limits of what can be possible. I don’t think of this car as something you would exhibit. I am thinking of it as something that will race in Le Mans. It’s a performative painting. My BMW Art Car was created in close collaboration with motorsport and engineering teams,” says Mehretu.
“For almost 50 years, we have been cooperating with artists who are just as fascinated by mobility and design as they are by technology and motorsports. Julie Mehretu’s vision for a racing car is a solid contribution to our BMW Art Cars series,” said Oliver Zipse, Chairman of the Board of Management of BMW AG.
“In the studio where I had the model of the BMW M Hybrid V8, I was just sitting in front of the painting, and I thought: What would happen if this car seemed to go through that painting and becomes affected by it,” Mehretu says. “The idea was to make a remix, a mash-up of the painting. I kept seeing that painting dripping into the car. Even the kidneys of the car inhaled the painting.”
The fusion of image and vehicle was realised with the help of 3D mapping, with the motif being transferred to the vehicle’s contours. The elaborate foiling allows the fully designed BMW M Hybrid V8 to compete at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
BMW Motorsport drivers Sheldon van der Linde (RSA), Robin Frijns (NED) and René Rast (GER) will enter the 20th BMW Art Car with starting number 20 at the Circuit de la Sarthe on June 15.
Before the race, Mehretu’s BMW Art Car will appear at the Concorso d’Eleganza at Villa d’Este in Lake Como.
As part of the exhibition for historic vehicles organised by the BMW Group and the Grand Hotel Villa d’Este, Mehretu will present the 20th edition of the BMW Art Car Collection.
It will be featured together with the BMW Art Cars by Alexander Calder (1975), Frank Stella (1976), Roy Lichtenstein (1977), Andy Warhol (1979), Jenny Holzer (1999) and Jeff Koons (2010), which also made their race debut at Le Mans.
Mehretu will discuss the creation of the 20th BMW Art Car in an artist talk with Adrian van Hooydonk, Head of BMW Group Design, on Sunday, May 26, 2024.
Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, in 1970. She moved to the U.S. with her family at the age of seven. She lives and works in New York City and Berlin.
Her practice in painting, drawing and printmaking engages the viewer in a dynamic visual articulation of contemporary experience, a depiction of social behaviour and the psychogeography of space by exploring palimpsests of history, from geological time to a modern-day phenomenology of the social.
She received her Bachelor’s Degree from the Kalamazoo College in Michigan, spent a year abroad at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, and completed her Master’s degree in Fine Art with honours from The Rhode Island School of Design in 1997.
Her largest European solo exhibition, “Ensemble”, opened on March 17, 2024, at Palazzo Grassi in Venice.
The BMW Art Car Collection
Artists from all over the world have participated in the BMW Art Car program since 1975. The initiative came from the French racing driver and art lover Hervé Poulain, who, together with the then BMW Head of Motorsport Jochen Neerpasch, asked his artist friend Alexander Calder to paint a car. The result was a BMW 3.0 CSL, which competed in the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1975 and became a crowd favourite.
This was the birth of the BMW Art Car Collection. In the years that followed, renowned artists such as Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Esther Mahlangu, David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Ólafur Elíasson and Jeff Koons enriched the collection with further BMW Art Cars, each in their style.
Most recently, the Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei and American conceptual artist John Baldessari each presented a BMW Art Car based on the BMW M6 GT3 and GTLM, respectively, in 2016 and 2017.
The BMW Art Cars are not only shown at their home, the BMW Museum in Munich, but are also on tour around the world as part of international exhibitions.
