BMW’s latest Art Car is a vehicle transformed by Julie Mehretu

‘There is something investigatory and playful about motor racing. It’s a form of sport, a form of imagination, a form of creativity. It’s an important place in the imagination. I was fascinated to play in that place,’ says the Ethiopian American artist Julie Mehretu.

The artist is referring to the latest BMW Art Car, the twentieth (and first ever hybrid model) in the illustrious initiative which began in 1975 when racing driver Hervé Poulain invited his friend, the artist Alexander Calder, to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL which was subsequently raced at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. 

The series has since seen work by some of the major names in twentieth and twenty-first century art, including David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Cao Fei and Jeff Koons, with spin-off works and limited editions being added to the mix in recent years. The primary work is always a racing car, and always a one-off.

For this project, Mehretu has transformed the new BMW M Hybrid V8 racecar into a truly dynamic work of art. Her staring point was her monumental painting Everywhen – currently on view at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice as part of the artist’s retrospective – which loosely informed the colour and form vocabulary on the surface of this car.

Everywhen was inspired by a photograph of the events in Washington on 6 January 2021 and the onslaught on Capitol Hill. With her thought processes stirred by the lockdown, Mehretu saw the opportunity of working with a dynamic three-dimensional moving machine as an opportunity to look afresh at the painting. She speaks of her Art Car metaphorically blasting through the painting, breathing in its energy with the idea of blur and the glitch as a symbol of movement and speed.

‘I went to see the race at Daytona, and the experience was overwhelming,’ she says. ‘Conceptually I imagined seeing it go through a painting and I thought of how the car inhales the painting. Then once the car is transported through the portal of the painting it becomes something else. It was an exciting idea to take a painting that exists but remixing it on a car, in ways that means taking some of the painting apart and relaying it on surfaces and in other areas, chopping up elements and mirroring that in different ways.’

The abstract visual forms we see on the car’s surfaces come 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. ‘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 grille ‘kidneys’ of the car inhaled the painting.’ Meanwhile, Mehretu worked with 3D mapping to transfer the motifs to the contours of the car, with its elaborate aerodynamic forms tailored for the Le Mans race.

‘After I saw the car race, what became interesting to me a is how the designers of the car also design the wrap and the way the car appears with the M logo,’ Mehretu continues, ‘So, when the car is still the logo appears totally shattered in red, black, white and blue, and yet when the car moves fast on a track the emblem comes to life.’

Mehretu set out to break this down and do the exact opposite; when the car is moving it is a full blur, but when it comes to a standstill you see the digitisation and animation of the marks and glitch and vibration that contributed to the process, demonstrating that the car itself has had an experience. ‘When in standstill you can see the painting, but when it’s moving, it’s a pure blur where you can see some of the marks in motion.’

Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1970, Mehretu moved to the US with her family as a child and now lives and works between New York City and Berlin. Space, movement and energy are central motifs in the artist’s work. Her practice in painting, drawing and printmaking is imbued with socio-political themes, engaging with other artworks, and is in conversation with music, media, and politics.

Mehretu was unanimously selected by an independent jury of international museum directors when the selection process began six years ago. ‘They wholeheartedly embraced Julie,’ says Thomas Girst, global head of cultural engagement at BMW. ‘I remember (Nigerian curator and writer) Okwui Enwezor saying at the time Julie would create a car that translates ‘dynamism within a form’. And that is what she created. To have her be the latest art car artist is an absolute dream come true for me personally. Her car is the greatest edition to the series I could possibly think of.’

The BMW collaboration also includes a joint commitment to a series of PanAfrican Translocal media workshops for filmmakers to tour various African cities in 2025 and 2026, concluding with a major exhibition at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town. The overall vision is to provide a forum for artists to develop new pathways towards a just civic future in their respective communities.

Mehretu believes the BMW Art Car is only complete once the Le Mans race is over. ‘The whole 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,’ she says. ‘I am thinking of it as something that will race. It’s a performative painting.’ 

She continues, ‘I’m interested in how we experience paintings and visual media, and how they evolve in front of us and have been part of our cultural language for a very long time. This work comes out of my practice but it’s doing something else. It is rethinking. It’s the first time I’ve remixed a painting in this way. I don’t think of it as just a rolling sculpture, or an artwork, but a car that will do a 24-hour race.’

On 15 June BMW Motorsport drivers Sheldon van der Linde (RSA), Robin Frijns (NED) and René Rast (GER) will enter the twentieth BMW Art Car into the 24 Hours of Le Mans race, bearing starting number 20 at the Circuit de la Sarthe.