Above the sparkling lights of the Eiffel Tower, in one of the last events to be staged at the Centre Pompidou in Paris before it shuts for a five-year refurbishment, BMW unveiled its latest Art Car alongside New York-based contemporary artist Julie Mehretu on Tuesday evening.
Like Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Michael Jagamara Nelson, Ken Done and Alexander Calder before her, Mehretu transformed the car – this time a BMW M Hybrid V8 race car – into a performative work of art, ready to compete in the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race next month.
Since 1975, renowned artists from all over the world have designed BMW Art Cars, starting when French racing driver and art lover Hervé Poulain, in collaboration with Calder, painted a BMW 3.0 CSL that raced in the 24 Hours of Le Mans and became a crowd favourite.
Mehretu, an Ethiopian American artist who usually paints onto canvas, said she was initially sceptical about taking on such a large – and 3 dimensional – project. “I was really concerned about taking on a project like this and I didn’t think I would be able to do it,” she said. “I realised that the whole Art Car project is about creating something new, being inventive and pushing boundaries to see what’s possible.”
Her painting Everywhen, currently on display at Venice’s Palazzo Grassi, was the starting point for the car. Mehretu’s vision for dotted grids, neon-coloured spray paint and her iconic gestural markings were then transferred as a high-resolution image onto the contours of the BMW M Hybrid V8 captured in a 3D scan, wrapping it in colour.
Mehretu, who worked closely with BMW’s director of automative design, Hussein Al-Attar, said: “I am fascinated by the sheer volume of data, calculations and knowledge that has gone into making this object.”
The collaboration between BMW and Julie Mehretu also includes a joint commitment to a series of PanAfrican 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.
