Designed by renowned New York-based contemporary artist Julie Mehretu, the 20th BMW Art Car was presented to the public for the first time on May 21 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. This project transforming the BMW M Hybrid V8 race car into a performative work of art, continues a longstanding tradition of BMW Art Cars and competitive racing. In a few weeks, the newest edition in the storied BMW Art Car collection will compete in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
The collaboration between BMW and Julie Mehretu also includes a joint commitment to a series of Pan-African Translocal Media Workshops for filmmakers, which will tour various African cities in 2025 and 2026 and will culminate in a major exhibition at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town.
“The whole BMW Art Car project is about invention, about imagination, about 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. The BMW Art Car is only completed once the race is over.”
Julie Mehretu
Julie Mehretu is a world-renowned American painter. She was born in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, in 1970. Together with her family, she moved to the U.S. at the age of seven. Mehretu currently 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 behavior, and the psychogeography of space by exploring palimpsests of history, from geological time to a modern-day phenomenology of the social.
“The BMW Art Cars are an essential part of our global cultural commitment. 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 an extraordinarily strong contribution to our BMW Art Cars series.”
– Oliver Zipse, Chairman of the Board of Management of BMW AG.
Space, movement, and energy have always been central motifs in Mehretu’s work. For the design of the 20th BMW Art Car, she transformed a two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional representation for the first time, with which she succeeded in bringing dynamism into form. Mehretu used the color and form vocabulary of her monumental painting “Everywhen” (2021 – 2023) as a starting point for her design.
The work is currently on view at Ensemble, the artist’s exhibition at the Pinault Collection – Palazzo Grassi in Venice, and will subsequently become part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to which it has been gifted.
Its abstract visual form results from digitally altered photographs, which are superimposed in several layers of dot grids, neon-colored veils, and the black markings characteristic of Mehretu’s work.
“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. The idea was to make a remix, a mash-up of the painting. I kept seeing that painting kind of dripping into the car. Even the kidneys of the car inhaled the painting.”
– Julie mehretu
The fusion of image and vehicle was realized with the help of 3D mapping, with which the motif was transferred to the contours of the vehicle. 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. Julie Mehretu is eagerly awaiting the race.
