Celebrated New York Artist Julie Mehretu Introduces The 20th BMW Art Car

Julie Mehretu has transformed the BMW M Hybrid V8 racecar into an exciting performative work of art, continuing the BMW Art Car tradition to go on and compete at the historic 24 Hours of Le Mans race in June 2024. The celebrated contemporary artist was a unanimous choice by an independent jury of international museum directors.

The BMW Art Car project started life in 1975 when racing driver Hervé Poulain casually asked his artist friend Alexander Calder to paint a 3.0 CSL which he subsequently raced at Le Mans. Since, the paintbrush of some of the most notable names in art history have stroked these racecars.

Space, movement and energy are central motifs in Mehretu’s work. For the design of the BMW Art Car, she references the color and form vocabulary of her monumental painting Everywhen (2021 – 2023), which is currently on view at Palazzo Grassi in Venice as part of the artist’s major retrospective and will find home at the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection.

Mehretu worked with 3D mapping to transfer the motif from her two-dimensional work to the contours of the three-dimensional vehicle to make sure the elaborate foiling allows for the fully designed M Hybrid V8 to compete at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Mehretu also designed the race suits and helmet for the BMW drivers competing at the race.

Everywhen blurs a photograph taken in Washington on January 6, 2021, and the onslaught on Capitol Hill, yet Mehretu wanted the Art Car project to find its own meaning through the process of making, the race and the marks of time. The project had been proposed in the first weeks of the pandemic when the world was locked away, and Mehretu saw this as a way of expressing a metaphorical portal to the possibilities of the future.

Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1970, Mehretu moved to the US with her family age seven, and now lives and works in New York City and Berlin. In her practice she engages the viewer in a dynamic visual articulation of contemporary experience, a depiction of social behavior and the psychogeography of space by exploring palimpsests of history, from geological time to a modern-day phenomenology of the social.

For the first time BMW is expanding on the Art Car commission to include a two-year-long collaboration for a series of PanAfrican Translocal media workshops whereby filmmakers tour various African cities during 2025 and 2026, concluding with a major exhibition at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town. The overall vision is to provide a forum for artists to develop new pathways towards a just civic future in their respective communities.

I caught up with Mehretu ahead of the reveal to understand her approach and see what the project means to her.

How would you describe your BMW Art Car?

I don’t think of this car as something you would exhibit; I am thinking of it as something that will race in Le Mans. It’s a performative painting. The BMW Art Car is only completed once the race is over.

What does the BMW Art Car mean to you?

What could be more radically insane than a car that is hovering at speed off the ground! The whole project is about invention, about imagination, about pushing limits of what can be possible.

What was the experience like working on this project?

What was exhilarating was that it is completely outside of my normal creative process—the overlap is in the aspect of design and mobility and invention and imagining other possibilities. It’s been interesting learning about this and be in conversation with the other designers, the engineers, physicists and to be able to work on a prototype. It’s been exhilarating being part of inventing something else. It is a massive collaborative effort and many dreams have been crafted.

What are the physical challenges of translating artwork, a painting toa car?

One thing I didn’t want to do is to paint car. The question for me is how you treat this so that it doesn’t just become a decorative project. It was good to talk to the designers and see how various lines and forces are at work to keep this vehicle on the ground and speeding fast on the ground. Also, how they looked to designing the car to look faster.

At what stage did you arrive at this idea of the car racing through your painting?

After I saw the car race, conceptually I imagined seeing it go through a painting, and thought of how the car inhales the painting, is transported through the portal of the painting and becomes something else. It was an exciting idea to take a painting that exists but remixing it in a car, in ways that means taking some of the painting apart and relaying it on surfaces and in other areas chopping up elements and mirroring that in different ways.

Your way of working feels quite fluid, in that you often allow the process, an element of chance, in. Can you describe the creative process?

I assimilated this on the computer by taking a high-resolution image of the painting, having the 3D model absorb the painting onto it from where certain decisions were made and from which we reworked it. There was an aspect of serendipity and luck involved at the beginning, and we then moved it forward.

What is your relationship with cars and motor racing?

My family are really into cars and I’ve loved cars since I was a kid, but I wasn’t into motor racing. My nephews encouraged me to take this project on. We were in the midst of the pandemic when Thomas (Thomas Girst, head of cultural engagement at BMW) contacted me and it felt like taking an escape route to a different part of the imagination.

How do you feel about motor racing now, following the project?

There is something investigatory and playful about motor racing. It’s a form of sport, a form of imagination, a form of creativity. It’s an important place in the imagination. I was fascinated to play in that place.

The marks you make in your work feel animated. How did this help you think about approaching an artwork in a three-dimensional way, and on the moving, racing car?

I went to see the M Hybrid V8 race in Daytona, and this experience was overwhelming. What became interesting to me a is how the designers of the car also design the wrap and the way the car appears with the M logo. So, when the car is still the logo is totally shattered in red, black, white and blue, and yet when the car moves fast on a track the emblem comes to life.

I wanted to break this down and somewhat do the opposite so when the car is moving it is a full blur but when it comes to a standstill you see the digitization and animation of the marks and glitch and vibration that contribute to the making of the car to show the car has had an experience. When in standstill you can see the painting, but when it’s moving it’s a pure blur of motion where you can see some of the marks in motion.

Is the experience of a painting critical to your work?

I’m interested in how we experience paintings and visual media, and how they evolve in front of us and have been part of our cultural language for a very long time. This work comes out of my practice but it’s doing something else. It is rethinking. It’s the first time I’ve remixed a painting in this way. I don’t think of it as just a rolling sculpture, or an artwork, but a car that will do a 24-hour race.

Your work engages with other artworks, and is in conversation with music, media, and politics. What references helped inform the Art Car?

The Art Car was about playing with the imaginary in a way that freezes it from the way I conceptually make a painting. I chose the painting that already existed as it had the most references to what I was interested in quoting: Frank Stella’s grid (on his 1976 BMW Art Car) and quoting Jenny Holzer’s more conceptual approach (on the 1999 BMW Art Car) by having the car be affected and go through the portal of the painting. The car will continue to get marked up through its experience in the race, by the shoes of the racing driver and the road. The car will be finished once the race is done.

What would you want competing race drivers to feel when they feel your car accelerating in the rearview mirror?

I’m hoping we’ll be far ahead, and win, with the other cars only seeing it from the back.