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Photo: BMW AG
“I didn’t want to just decorate a car,” says Julie Mehretu. It took BMW several attempts to convince the Ethiopian-American contemporary artist, one of Time‘s 100 Most Influential People of 2020, to agree to join the prodigious ranks of Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jeff Koons, amongst others, and add her own rendition to BMW’s acclaimed Art Car Collection.
In 2018, the multi-award-winning MacArthur Fellow was selected by a jury of high-ranking representatives of the international art world as the artist to create the 20th BMW Art Car, unveiled in a world premiere at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in May.
The BMW 20th Art Car in Paris for its world premiere in May. (Photo: BMW AG)
Space, movement, and energy have always been central motifs in Mehretu’s work. With the BMW M Hybrid V8 as a canvas, the New York City-based artist has transformed a race car into a performative work of art that would go on to compete in the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race in mid-June.
“The whole BMW Art Car project is about invention, about imagination, about pushing limits of what can be possible,” says Mehretu, who broke the auction record for an African artist at Sotheby’s Hong Kong with her piece “Untitled (2001)”, which sold for US$9.32 million ($12.58 million), making her one of only two women to have made the list of the top 10 most expensive contemporary artworks sold in 2023.
Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu with the 20th BMW Art Car at the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este festival in Lake Como. (Photo: BMW AG)
An abstract remix of space and time
Mehretu’s monumental painting “Everywhen” (2021 – 2023) is currently on view at her “Ensemble” exhibition at The Pinault Collection – Palazzo Grassi in Venice. It will subsequently become part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, providing the starting point for her first three-dimensional piece of work.
“The title comes from the Aboriginal concept where space and time are not linear, and with the Art Car, it’s the idea that it goes through this kind of space-time shift; that’s what those races seem like to me — pushing the limits of space,” explains Mehretu, at the BMW Group’s annual Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este festival in Lake Como, where the car was showcased alongside other storied greats of the BMW Art Car Collection.
“Everywhen” by Julie Mehretu. (Photo: Julie Mehretu)
“I had the model of the BMW M Hybrid V8 in my studio, and I thought, ‘What would happen if this car seemed to go through the painting and become affected by it?” she adds.
The painting’s abstract visual aesthetic — composed of digitally altered photographs superimposed in several layers of dot grids, neon-coloured veils, and the black markings characteristic of Mehretu’s work — was transferred onto the contours of the vehicle with the help of 3D mapping and elaborate foiling. The added challenge was ensuring no additional weight was added to the race car that would compromise the aerodynamics in the process.
“The idea was to make a remix, a mash-up of the painting. DJs do it with music a lot; they sample, chop and redo songs all the time. I kept seeing that painting kind of dripping into the car. Even the kidneys of the car inhaled the painting,” shares the 53-year-old.
Julie Mehretu’s BMW 20th Art Car showcased at Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este alongside the Frank Stella (left) and Jenny Holzer (right) editions from 1976 and 1999, respectively. (Photo: BMW AG)
The painting as a portal
Then, there’s the idea of the glitch. “I was interested in what happens when the car fully blurs (during the race), where everything about it disappears, and it becomes like an animation. And when that stops, it’s the glitch of it going through the metaphoric space of the painting: The painting as a portal — and that’s the first mission of the car,” says Mehretu.
Its second mission was the endurance race, as it was the first BMW M Motorsport prototype to compete in Le Mans since the BMW V12 LMR, which won the classic race in 1999.
“By then, it has already been through one form of a completely different spatialisation in space and time, and that becomes this remix on the car. But the BMW Art Car is only completed once the race ends,” she elaborates.
Having spun a visual web spanning Mad Max references to graffiti and street art, turning the notion of speed into a visceral experience was the next paramount progression. “I’m not so interested in a painting trying to tell a narrative; I’m more interested in what we don’t have language for and how the visual can become a visceral experience where you feel some form of transformation from experience. So I want all the scratches and marks on the car from the race and the track (to show that) it’s been through something,” she says.
The BMW M Hybrid V8 transformed into the BMW 20th Art Car by Julie Mehretu, competing in the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race. (Photo: BMW AG)
Supporting African artists
For Mehretu, who was born in Ethiopia and whose family moved to the U.S. when she was seven, the collaboration with BMW needed to extend beyond the automobile.
To this end, a series of Pan-African Translocal Media Workshops have been planned together with Mehret Mandefro, Emmy-nominated producer, writer, and co-founder of the Realness Institute, to strengthen the media ecosystem in Africa and provide a platform for emerging artists and filmmakers.
The workshops will tour various African cities, including Dakar, Marrakech, and Rwanda, throughout 2025, culminating in a major exhibition at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town in 2026.
“What’s amazing about the Art Cars is that BMW offers artists this opportunity to play in this space of imagination and dreams. From the designers to the engineers creating these cars, it’s all about building this crazy fantasy of futurist objects, catapulting like a rocket from the ground, but doesn’t fly away,” she muses.
