Fine cars exist at the intersection of engineering and art. The long-running BMW Art Car program takes that relationship to the next level, working with world-renowned artists to decorate its cars since the mid-1970s.
For the 20th BMW Art Car, the German automaker tapped visual artist Julie Mehretu to create a colorful skin for its M Hybrid V8 racecar.
The Mehretu-designed BMW Art Car made its global debut on May 21, 2024, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In June, this newest edition to the BMW Art Car collection will compete in the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race, which Mehretu views as a crucial part of this artistic process. "The BMW Art Car is only completed once the race is over," Mehretu says.
This BMW M Hybrid V8 will be the first BMW M Motorsport prototype to compete in 24 Hours of Le Mans since the BMW V12 LMR won the race in 1999. Later, the 2024 BMW Art Car will challenge world-class competition in the Hypercars category of the FIA World Endurance Championship races.
Born in Ethiopia and raised in the United States from the age of seven, New York-based Mehretu used her monumental “Everywhen” (2021-2023) painting as the inspiration for the car. “Everywhen” is currently on view at the artist’s major retrospective at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice and will soon join the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. That painting, and much of Mehretu's work, explores space, movement, and energy, themes that are reflected in her BMW Art Car.
BMW's collaboration with Mehretu also features a series of Pan-African Translocal Media Workshops for filmmakers. Over the next two years, the workshops will tour Dakar, Senegal, Marrakech, Morocco, Kigali, Rwanda, Lagos, Nigeria, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Cape Town, South Africa, and Zanzibar, Tanzania, before culminating in a major exhibition at the Zeitz Museum in Cape Town, South Africa.
