For the past five decades, iconic artists such as Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, and Robert Rauschenberg have transformed BMW cars into canvases for their signature styles. Now, Ethiopian American artist Julie Mehretu, renowned for her abstract paintings, has joined their ranks as the newest creator of a BMW Art Car.
Last year, Mehretu was selected to design the 20th BMW Art Car, which she recently unveiled at the Pompidou Center in Paris. Her artwork adorns a BMW M Hybrid V8, a plug-in hybrid track-only racing car engineered in collaboration with Italian race car manufacturer Dallara. This car, characterized by its low, wide frame and large rear wing, will soon hit the track at the 24 Hours of Le Mans race.
For this commission, Mehretu adapted her notable painting “Everywhen,” housed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Both the painting and the car feature broad washes of color intersected by bold black streaks and lines. “In the studio where I had the model of the BMW M Hybrid V8, I was just sitting in front of the painting and I thought: What would happen if this car seemed to go through that painting and become affected by it,” Mehretu explained. “The idea was to make a remix, a mash-up of the painting. I kept seeing that painting kind of dripping into the car.”
The BMW Art Car project began in 1975 when American sculptor Alexander Calder painted a BMW 3.0 CSL, an idea conceived by French racing driver Hervé Poulain. Since then, the project has included contributions from artists like Roy Lichtenstein, who in 1977 adorned a BMW 320 Group 5 with his signature graphic stripes and dots, and Andy Warhol, who in 1979 used textured, pastel brushstrokes to paint a BMW M1. The first woman to take on a BMW Art Car was South African artist Esther Mahlangu in 1991, who painted a 525i sedan.
Mehretu’s work often draws from architecture and bustling urban environments, featuring intricate lines and shapes inspired by technical drawings and building plans, and exploring themes such as migration, colonization, and globalization. Critics praise her innovative, abstract works for their sense of humanity, movement, and complex emotion. Her notable large-scale pieces include an eighty-foot-long mural for the Goldman Sachs building in Manhattan and “Mogama (A Painting in 4 Parts),” a more contemplative, gray-toned work.
Represented by the Marian Goodman Gallery, Mehretu’s body of work is described as “a dynamic visual articulation of contemporary experience, a depiction of social behavior and the psychogeography of space.” The gallery emphasizes her practice’s role in provoking thought and reflection on contemporary conditions.
Born in 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Mehretu moved to the United States at age seven to escape civil war. She earned a Master of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 and is currently based in New York. Her accolades include a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005 and a US Department of State Medal of Arts Award in 2015.
Mehretu was unanimously chosen for this project by a jury of distinguished gallery and museum directors. Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker Director at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and a jury member, described Mehretu as the “perfect artist” for the BMW Art Car. “For years, Julie has painted speed and for a long time worked very successfully at scale,” Grynsztejn said. “To merge her work with the shape and form of a speeding vehicle is really an alignment of perfection.”
