BMW’s 20th Art Car had its coming out party on May 21, 2024, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The artist is Julie Mehretu, an Ethiopian-born, American woman, born in 1970. Her ‘canvas’ was the BMW M Hybrid racecar, which will participate in the 24 Hours of Le Mans in June.

The 20th BMW Art Car will see battle in June at Le Mans

Leading up to race day, Julie Mehretu's BMW Art Car will make an appearance at the Concorso d'Eleganza at Villa d'Este in Lake Como on its way to Le Mans. As part of the exhibition for historic vehicles 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 featured on the grounds of the 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 also made their race debuts at Le Mans. Julie Mehretu will discuss the creation of the 20th BMW Art Car in an artist talk with Adrian van Hooydonk, Head of BMW Group Design, on Sunday, May 26, 2024.

Head-on view of the BMW Hybrid Racecar.

Space, movement, and energy have always been central motifs in Julie Mehretu's work. For the design of the 20th BMW Art Car, she transformed a two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional representation, with which she succeeded in bringing dynamism into form. Julie 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 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 has been gifted.

Art Car Artists typically finalize their design using a 1:5 scale maquette. In this case, both the model and the full-sized car had a vinyl wrap applied.

To see the first 19 BMW Art Cars, the chapter website has an article featuring all of them: https://bmw-club-psr.org/zundfolge/2017/02/bmw-art-car-collection/

Artist and Patron: The gray-haired man is Thomas Girst, in charge of Cultural Engagement for BMW AG.