Art meets speed machine

The wraps have come off the 20th BMW Art Car at the Centre Pompidou Centre in Paris. 

Designed by renowned New York-based contemporary artist Julie Mehretu, it transforms the BMW M Hybrid V8 race car into a performative work of art. 

“The whole project is about invention, imagination, about pushing limits of what can be possible,” says Mehretu.

“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.”

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. 

She used the colour and form vocabulary of her monumental painting Everywhen (2021-23) as a starting point. The work is currently on view at the artist’s exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice and will become part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art 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-coloured veils and the black markings characteristic of Mehretu’s work. 

Renowned artists have participated in the BMW Art Car programme since 1975. The initiative came from French racing driver and art lover Hervé Poulain. 

He and then BMW head of motorsport, Jochen Neerpasch, asked his artist friend Alexander Calder to paint a car. The result was a 3.0 CSL, which competed in the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1975.

This was the birth of the 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 have added to it.