The 20th BMW Art Car is presented to the public for the first time today at the Center Pompidou in Paris. Designed by renowned contemporary New York artist Julie Mehretu, the project transforms the BMW M Hybrid V8 racer into a work of performance art, continuing a long tradition of BMW Art Cars and competitive racing.
A few weeks after its world premiere in the French capital, the new edition of the legendary BMW Art Car collection will compete at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The link between BMW and tennis arises from the sharing of fundamental and universal values such as integration, style , respect for the opponent, performance, elegance, the continuous search for perfection. Sport, and tennis in particular, is a universal language that unites peoples, cultures and genders.
“The whole BMW Art Car project is about invention, about imagination, about pushing the limits of what is possible. I’m not thinking of this car as something to be displayed. I’m thinking of it as something that will race at Le Mans. It’s a performative painting. My BMW Art Car was created in close collaboration with the motorsport and engineering teams,” says Julie Mehretu. “The BMW Art Car is only completed when the race is over.”
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 stop in various African cities in 2025 and 2026, culminating in a major exhibition at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in City of the Cape.
“BMW Art Cars are an essential part of our global cultural commitment. For almost 50 years we have collaborated with artists who are as fascinated by mobility and design as they are by technology and motorsport. Julie Mehretu’s vision for a racing car is an extraordinarily strong contribution to our BMW Art Cars series,” said Oliver Zipse, Chairman of the Board of Management of BMW AG. “Julie Mehretu created more than just a fantastic Art Car. Her ideas provided the impetus to broaden our Art Cars’ cultural commitment to fostering the creativity of young artists in Africa.”
BMW M Hybrid V8 Art Car
Photo credit: BMW AG
A Performative Painting is born
Space, movement and energy have always been central motifs in Julie Mehretu’s work. For the design of the 20th BMW Art Car, you transformed a two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional representation for the first time, managing to bring dynamism into the form.
Julie Mehretu used the vocabulary of color and form from her monumental painting “Everywhen” (2021 – 2023) as a starting point for her design. The work is currently on display in the artist’s major retrospective at the 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 was donated.
Its abstract visual form results from digitally altered photographs, superimposed in multiple 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 thought: What if this car seemed to pass through that painting and was influenced by it,” says Julie Mehretu. “The idea was to do a remix, a mashup of the painting. I kept seeing that paint somehow dripping onto the car. Even the kidneys of the car absorbed the painting.”
BMW M Hybrid V8 Art Car
Photo credit: BMW AG
BMW Art Cars with Le Mans history reunite at the Concours d’Elegance
The fusion of image and vehicle was achieved with the help of 3D mapping, with which the pattern was transferred to the contours of the vehicle. The complex foil enables the fully engineered BMW M Hybrid V8 to compete in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
BMW Motorsport drivers Sheldon van der Linde (RSA), Robin Frijns (NED) and René Rast (GER) will race the 20th BMW Art Car with the race number 20 at the Circuit de la Sarthe on 15 June. Like them, Julie Mehretu is also looking forward to the race: “I went to see the BMW M Hybrid V8 race at Daytona, and this experience was overwhelming. Designers, engineers, aerodynamicists and many other creative minds are working to bring this vehicle at its extreme. When it goes out on the track now, many dreams will come true.”
Prior to race day, Julie Mehretu’s BMW Art Car will make an appearance at the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este on Lake Como on the way to Le Mans. As part of the historic vehicle exhibition organized by the BMW Group and the Grand Hotel Villa d’Este, Julie Mehretu herself will present the 20th edition of the BMW Art Car Collection.
It will be exhibited in the gardens of Villa Erba 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 they also debuted at Le Mans. Julie Mehretu will discuss the creation of the 20th BMW Art Car in a talk with Adrian van Hooydonk, Head of BMW Group Design, on Sunday 26 May 2024.
BMW M Hybrid V8 Art Car by Julie Mehretu
Photo credit: BMW AG
Inspiration for Young Artists: PanAfrican Translocal Media Workshops
The collaboration between BMW and Julie Mehretu was conceived beyond the automobile from the beginning. It will end after the 24 Hours of Le Mans in a project for emerging artists from the African continent: The Pan-African Translocal Media Workshops. Together, the partners focus on the creative potential across the African continent, where the BMW Group has been contributing to social responsibility with educational projects for over 50 years.
Julie Mehretu and Mehret Mandefro, producer, screenwriter and co-founder of the Realness Institute, which works to strengthen the media ecosystem in Africa, will organize workshops in various African cities and regions throughout 2025.
The aim of the project is to provide a space for artists and filmmakers to collaborate and exchange ideas. These gatherings will provide a forum for artists to develop new paths toward a just civic future in their respective communities.
The series of Pan-African Translocal Workshops will stop in the cities of Dakar (Senegal), Marrakech (Morocco), Kigali (Rwanda), Lagos (Nigeria) and Cape Town (South Africa). The results of the workshops will be presented alongside the 20th BMW Art Car at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town in the first half of 2026.
The BMW Group is thus consistently continuing its decades-long support for cinema and creative talents: from the short film series ‘The Hire’ and the partnership with the Cannes Film Festival to the acquisition of works by students from art academies in the factory districts of the company worldwide.
BMW M Hybrid V8 Art Car by Julie Mehretu
Photo credit: BMW AG
The Artist
Julie Mehretu is a world-renowned American painter. She was born in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, in 1970. She and her family moved to the United States at the age of seven. She lives and works in New York and Berlin.
Mehretu’s practice in painting, drawing and graphics engages the viewer in a dynamic visual articulation of contemporary experience, a representation of social behavior and the psychogeography of space, exploring the palimpsests of history, from geological time to a modern phenomenology of social.
Mehretu earned her bachelor’s degree from Kalamazoo College in Michigan, spent a year abroad at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, and completed her Master of Fine Art with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 .
Mehretu has received numerous awards, including the MacArthur Award (2005), the Berlin Prize: Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin (2007), and the US Department of State Medal of Arts Award (2015). A mid-career retrospective of his work recently toured at LACMA (Los Angeles), High Museum (Atlanta), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), and Walker Museum of Art (Minneapolis) from 2019 to 2023. His largest European solo exhibition so far entitled “Ensemble” was inaugurated on March 17, 2024 at Palazzo Grassi in Venice.
Mehretu is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Design. Her global representative is the Marian Goodman Gallery. She also exhibits with White Cube, London, and Carlier Gebauer, Berlin.
BMW M Hybrid V8 Art Car
Photo credit: BMW AG
Statement of the Jury for the 20th BMW Art Car
In 2018 Julie Mehretu was unanimously selected by a jury of high-level representatives from the international art world to design the 20th BMW Art Car. The panel includes renowned curators and museum directors from various countries, including Koyo Kouoh, Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town; Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London; and Cecilia Alemani, Director and Chief Curator of High Line Art, New York.
On the occasion of the world premiere of Julie Mehretu’s BMW Art Car in Paris, the members of the jury published the following statement: “We are thrilled with Julie’s BMW Art Car! Okwui Enwezor had already coined the phrase ‘Dynamism in Form’ during the our judging session and nothing applies better to his BMW M Hybrid V8 racing car.
Julie’s first three-dimensional work combines her aesthetic and formal language with the idea of glitch and blur, transforming speed into a visceral experience. This energetic space is as fierce and competitive on the track as it is ambitious as a creative playground of the imagination. Not only does it pay homage to the art cars of Jenny Holzer and Frank Stella, but she also weaves a visual web from Mad Max to street art and graffiti that is unique in the BMW Art Car series.”
BMW M Hybrid V8 Art Car by Julie Mehretu
Photo credit: BMW AG
The BMW Art Car Collection
World-renowned artists have participated in the BMW Art Car program since 1975. The initiative originated with the French racing driver and art lover Hervé Poulain, who together with the then Head of BMW 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 following years, 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 with their own individual style. More recently, Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei and American conceptual artist John Baldessari presented a BMW Art Car based on the BMW M6 GT3 and GTLM respectively in 2016 and 2017. BMW Art Cars are not only displayed at their venue, the BMW Museum in Munich, but are also on tour around the world as part of international exhibitions.
#Mans #BMW #presents #special #livery #Hybrid
