Julie Mehretu has been announced as the creator of the 20th BMW Art Car. BMW’s Art Car Collection is the stuff of corporate legend, a cohesive, credible and widely admired pairing of contemporary artists given free rein to treat a BMW (preferably a racing one) as a canvas.
Starting with Alexander Calder’s BMW 3.0 CSL in 1975, on the urging of his friend, the auctioneer and racing driver Hervé Poulain, the series has included works by Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Esther Mahlangu, David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Olafur Eliasson, Cao Fei and Jeff Koons, who also went on to create a limited edition BMW 8-Series. Overseen for 20 years by Thomas Girst, each new commission is given suitably elevated prominence in the art world.
Julie Mehretu is no different, with the announcement taking place at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York. Mehretu was chosen by an international jury of museum directors and curators; her canvas will be the BMW M Hybrid V8, shown here in raw carbon fibre.
BMW M Hybrid V8
Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1970, and her family moved to America in 1977. After studying at Kalamazoo College, Michigan, and the Rhode Island School of Design, Mehretu has used her work to explore psychogeography and the lived experience of space, building up a rich body of paintings, prints and drawings (see our 2021 interview with Mehretu, ahead of her exhibition at the Whitney).
In addition to the creation of the livery for the 2024 Le Mans car, Mehretu’s appointment will include the establishment of artistic workshops across Africa in 2025. The Translocal Media Workshop Series, devised in collaboration with the Emmy-nominated producer and writer Mehret Mandefro, will see the creation of spaces for artists to meet, exchange, and collaborate in trans-local ways. The series will culminate in an exhibition at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town in 2025, including the 20th BMW Art Car.
Work by Julie Mehretu, creator of the 20th BMW Art Car
BMW.com, BMW Art Cars at BMW Welt
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