Munich/New York. BMW announced a collaboration today
at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City with
internationally renowned New York-based artist Julie Mehretu to create
the 20th BMW Art Car. Mehretu was unanimously chosen by an
international jury of museum directors and curators, and will be given
total creative freedom to design the next instalment in BMW’s
legendary collection of ”rolling sculptures”. BMW will enter Mehretu’s
BMW M Hybrid V8 Art Car in the 24 Hour race of Le Mans in June 2024.
This continues an almost 50-year tradition that has delighted not only
motorsport enthusiasts but anyone into design or the arts, technology
and mobility. Since 1975, artists such as Alexander Calder, Frank
Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Cao
Fei, and John Baldessari have created racing cars for BMW.
“I’ve loved cars for most of my life, as toys, as objects, as
possibilities. It is from that space that I’m really excited to be
working on the next BMW Art Car more than anything,” stated Julie
Mehretu. “The thrill of the speed, the 24 Hour race of Le Mans and
what is possible to invent in hybrid and fully electric vehicles as
future modes of play and pushing ahead into new terrains of
transportation and motorsports.”
”The BMW Art Car Collection is a central element of our global
cultural commitment, which has been in place for more than 50
years,” said Ilka Horstmeier, Member of the Board of Management
of BMW AG, Human Resources and Real Estate, at the presentation in New
York. ”The combination of technology and art, of design and motorsport
sparks a timeless fascination. I have admired Julie Mehretu’s work for
many years. I am particularly pleased that our cooperation will have a
lasting cultural impact beyond the vehicle she has designed,
especially in Africa.”
An artistic concept beyond the car: Translocal Media Workshop
Series in 2025
The collaboration between BMW and Julie
Mehretu will not only leave its mark on the Le Mans racetrack.
There are far and few spaces on the continent of Africa where artists
can convene, exchange, and experiment in ways that foster
collaboration across local contexts. Julie Mehretu and Mehret
Mandefro, Emmy-nominated producer, writer and co-founder of the
Realness Institute which aims to strengthen the media ecosystem across
Africa, will host a series of gatherings in eight African cities over
the course of nine months to open up space for artists to meet,
exchange, and collaborate in translocal ways. These workshops have the
sole intention of opening up a forum for the artists to consider new
pathways to implementing just civic futures in their respective local
communities and harness the power of the translocal collective.
The methodology of these workshops is based on the Exodus Media
Workshop (EMW) which is an arts education laboratory initiated by
Denniston Hill that focuses on the inter-dependent inventions of image
making and representation in the media. The workshop begins from the
shared intention that we must disentangle self-being from its mediated
depiction, and that our identities can be reclaimed and reshaped by
our own standards.
The outcome and results of the workshops will be presented together
with the 20th BMW Art Car at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art
Africa in Cape Town in 2025.
The artist.
Julie Mehretu was born in Addis
Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia, in 1970. Together with her family
she moved to the USA at the age of seven. She received her B.A. from
Kalamazoo College, Michigan, graduated from The Rhode Island School of
Design with a Masters of Fine Arts degree in 1997, and also spent a
year studying at Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar Senegal. In
exploring palimpsests of history, from geological time to a modern-day
phenomenology of the social, her paintings, prints and drawings engage
the viewer in a dynamic visual articulation of contemporary
experience, a depiction of social behavior and the psychogeography of space.
Mehretu has been running a studio in New York since 1999. She has
received numerous awards for her work, including the MacArthur Award
and the US Department of State Medal of Arts Award. A representative
survey of her work has been exhibited at LACMA (Los Angeles), the High
Museum (Atlanta), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), and
the Walker Museum of Art (Minneapolis) from 2019 to 2023. In 2021,
Julie Mehretu became a member of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences and the National Academy of Design.
Julie Mehretu is represented globally by Marian Goodman Gallery, and
also exhibits with White Cube, London, and Carlier Gebauer, Berlin.
Statements of the jury. Unanimous
nomination.
Julie Mehretu was unanimously chosen to
design the 20th BMW Art Car in 2018 by an international
jury from the art world with an outstanding reputation based on their
experience and expertise in leading positions at major museums and
galleries. It is composed of the following personalities:
- Cecilia Alemani, Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director and Chief Curator,
High Line Art, New York - Richard Armstrong, Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and
Foundation, New York - Anton Belov, Director, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow
- Anita Dube, artist and curator Kochi-Muziris-Biennale 2018
- Yilmaz Dziewior, Director, Museum Ludwig, Cologne
- Okwui Enwezor (1963 – 2019), former Director, Haus der Kunst, Munich
- Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, New Museum,
New York - Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker Director, Museum of Contemporary
Art Chicago - Koyo Kouoh, Executive Director and Chief Curator, Zeitz MOCAA,
Cape Town - Matthias Mühling, Director, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und
Kunstbau, Munich - Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London
- Hervé Poulain, Initiator BMW Art Car Collection and CEO Artcurial
- Stephanie Rosenthal, Director, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi
Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker Director, Museum of Contemporary Art
Chicago:
“Julie Mehretu is the perfect artist for this early 21st
century. To merge her work with the shape and form of a speeding
vehicle is really an alignment of perfection. For years, Julie has
painted speed and for a long time worked very successfully at scale.
This means to me that she will be able to create a form that you can
see from a distance because with many of her large commissions, you
need to back up to really enjoy them. She has an understanding of
space and speed that is a perfect partner to the BMW Art Car.”
Koyo Kouoh, Executive Director and Chief Curator, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape
Town:
“I think that Julie Mehretu’s practice combines a
sprawling visuality with a political background. She will be the
perfect artist to really moderate this tension about race, technology,
car, velocity and bring it into a form that is legible for the wider public.”
Okwui Enwezor (1963 – 2019), former Director, Haus der Kunst,
Munich:
“Julie Mehretu’s work incapsulates different questions of
movement. She expresses dynamism within a form. It is
a very clear and sound understanding of how the object acts in space.
And I think this really makes it a very exciting proposition to have
an artist of her calibre who has the long-standing experience to take
on this project.”
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries,
London:
“Julie Mehretu creates paintings which very often go
beyond the canvas. Her practice is very interdisciplinary and of
course, that’s exactly what will happen with the BMW Art Car. The
artists do not just develop ideas alone in their studio, but in
dialogue with many people in the company and particularly with the
engineers, the inventors and the designers.”
Cecilia Alemani, Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director and Chief Curator,
High Line Art, New York:
“I think Julie is a wonderful artist who
has been able to bring the three-dimensionality of our reality into
the two-dimensionality of paintings and flat surfaces. She is someone
that has been looking at our cities, the speed of our culture, vectors
and velocity and these are all themes that resonate with the BMW Art
Car. Her project for the BMW Art Car will be compelling and bring
together all these aspects into this wonderful platform.”
Stephanie Rosenthal, Director, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi:
“Julie
Mehretu is mainly known for large-scale two-dimensional works which
are based on speed, space, creating and imagining space. And so now
working with the BMW Art Car really will extend, I think, her
experience of working with a three-dimensional object and kind of
implementing her idea of space, and also probably become a form of
futurist architecture exploring technology. And, therefore, I think
she’s a brilliant pick.”
The BMW M Hybrid V8.
The canvas for the 20th BMW
Art Car is the BMW M Hybrid V8. BMW M GmbH’s new competition car in
endurance racing features a hybrid drive system with around 640 hp,
whose 4.0-liter V8 engine is supported by an electric motor (max
speed: up to 345 kph/215 mph, depending on track layout). This makes
the prototype race car, which weighs just 1,030 kilograms, the poster
child for typical M performance and the fascination with electrified drives.
The BMW M Hybrid V8 is currently competing successfully in the GTP
(Grand Touring Prototype) class of the North American IMSA endurance
racing series. BMW M Motorsport will also return to the FIA World
Endurance Championship in the 2024 season. In the races for the
official FIA World Endurance Championship, the BMW M Hybrid V8 will
face top-class competition in the Hypercars category. This means that
the BMW M Hybrid V8 will also be competing in the 24 Hours of Le Mans
– the first BMW M Motorsport prototype since the BMW V12 LMR won the
classic in 1999.
The BMW Art Car Collection.
Since 1975, renowned
artists from all over the world have been designing BMW Art Cars. The
initiative came from French racing driver and art lover Hervé Poulain,
who, in collaboration with then Head of BMW Motorsport Jochen
Neerpasch, asked his artist friend Alexander Calder to paint an
automobile. The result was a BMW 3.0 CSL that competed in the 24 Hours
of Le Mans in 1975, where it became a crowd favorite. This was the
birth of the BMW Art Car Collection.
In the years that followed, renowned artists such as Frank Stella,
Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Esther Mahlangu,
David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Ólafur Elíasson and Jeff Koons added
further BMW Art Cars to the collection, each in their own individual
style. Most recently, Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei and American
John Baldessari each presented a BMW Art Car based on the BMW M6 GT3
in 2016 and 2017. The BMW Art Cars are not only shown at their home,
the BMW Museum in Munich, but also travel around the world as part of
international exhibitions.
