Julie Mehretu’s BMW Art Car Revealed in Paris

The M Hybrid V8 race car with Mehretu’s graffiti-esque design will compete in the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race next month.

Julie Mehretu‘s BMW art car was revealed to the public at Centre Pompidou in Paris yesterday. The design, applied as a film wrap, is true to Mehretu’s visual style, which resembles spray-can street art but is constructed using elements including digitally altered news images, airbrushing, and sanding.

Discussing her practice with Ocula in 2020, the Ethiopia-born, New York-based artist said, ‘opacity and abstraction are at the core of my practice and have been since graduate school. One should never feel the need to translate, or explain who and how one is for anyone else.’

Julie Mehretu, Everywhen (2021–2023). Ink and acrylic on canvas, 304.8 x 304.8 cm. Courtesy the artist, White Cube, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Photo: Tom Powel.

‘I don’t think of this car as something you would exhibit,’ Mehretu said in a statement.

Instead, it will be driven by racing drivers Sheldon van der Linde, Robin Frijns, and René Rast at Le Mans’ Circuit de la Sarthe on 15 June.

BMW Art Car #20 by artist Julie Mehretu. Photo: Andreas Hempel © BMW AG.

‘The BMW Art Car is only completed once the race is over,’ Mehretu added.

Mehretu’s whip is the 20th in BMW’s series of Art Cars, and it will race as number 20.

Prior to Le Mans, the car will show at the Concorso d’Eleganza at Villa d’Este in Lake Como alongside Art Cars by Alexander Calder (1975), Frank Stella (1976), Roy Lichtenstein (1977), Andy Warhol (1979), Jenny Holzer (1999), and Jeff Koons (2010).

BMW Art Car #20 by Julie Mehretu: Creation process in Munich. Photo: Jackie Furtado © BMW AG.

Mehretu is the first artist to create a BMW Art Car since Cao Fei (2016) and John Baldessari (2017), but Bavarian Motor Works continued to collaborate with contemporary artists in the intervening years.

They presented Alex Israel‘s installation REMEMBR (2023), which used AI to select and broadcast images from visitors’ camera rolls, at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2022 and Art Basel Hong Kong earlier this year. —[O]

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