Achi news desk-
Over the past 50 years, artists including Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer and Robert Rauschenberg have been chosen by the luxury car company to use BMW as their canvas, each decorating one of the famous BMWs. Art is found in their signature style.
Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu, known for her work in abstract painting, was chosen last year to create the company’s newest ‘Art Car’. Her artwork, painted on a BMW M Hybrid V8, was recently unveiled at the Pompidou Center in Paris and will be on track at next month’s 24 Hours of Le Mans race.
The BMW M Hybrid V8, a plug-in hybrid, is a track-only racing car created to compete in the international endurance racing circuit. Designed and engineered in collaboration with Italian racing car manufacturer Dalara, it is low and wide with a massive rear wing and a large vertical steering wheel.
For the commission, which marks BMW’s 20th Art Car, Mehretu chose to adapt one of her most famous works: The painting “Everywhen,” now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The painting – and the car – are covered in broad washes of color broken through with broad black lines 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 the that painting and being affected by it,” Mehretu said in a statement. “The idea was to make a remix, a mix of the painting. I kept seeing that kind of paint dripping onto the car.”
The first BMW Art Car was painted in 1975 by American sculptor Alexander Calder after French racing driver Hervé Poulain brought the idea to BMW. Poulain drove the Calder-painted BMW 3.0 CSL at Le Mans that year. In 1977, Roy Lichtenstein covered a BMW 320 Group 5 in the graphic stripes and dots for which he was famous; Warhol painted a BMW M1 in 1979 with textured pastel brush strokes.
The first woman to take on a BMW Art car was South African artist Esther Mahlangu, who painted a 525i sedan in 1991. In 1996, Holzer covered a BMW Le Mans race car in the words “Protect Me From What I Want,” among provocative phrases others.
Mehretu’s practice is often inspired by architecture and busy urban settings, including complex juxtapositions of lines and shapes – inspired by technical drawings and building plans – and, sometimes, splashes of color or deep darkness. Her work has also tackled themes such as migration, colonization and globalisation.
Critics often highlight the sense of humanity evident in her innovative, abstract works. There is complex movement and emotion. Mehretu is best known for large-scale pieces, such as an eighty-foot-long mural he created for the lobby of the Goldman Sachs building in Manhattan. It is busy and bright with colored shapes covering dark straight lines; the red, yellow, blue and green forms seem to be shooting out across the massive wall. Other works, such as “Mogama (A Painting in 4 Parts),” are grayer and hotter but retain a soft, rippling sense of motion.
She is represented by the Marian Goodman Gallery, which describes her body of work on its website as “a dynamic visual reference to contemporary experience, a depiction of social behavior and the psychogeography of space.”
“Mehretu’s practice in painting, drawing and printmaking equally emphatically declares the role of art to stimulate thought and reflection, and express the contemporary condition of the individual and society,” added the gallery.
Mehretu was born in 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to an Ethiopian father and an American mother. Seven years later, the family moved to the United States to escape the then brutal civil war in the country. In 1997, he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design; she is currently based in New York.
She has received widespread acclaim for her work, and prestigious awards including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005 and, in 2015, a US State Department Medal of Arts Award.
She was unanimously selected for this project by a jury of prominent gallery and museum directors.
Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker Director at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and a member of that jury, described Mehretu as the “perfect artist” to challenge the BMW Art Car in a statement released last June announcing her selection. “For years, Julie has painted speed and for a long time has worked very successfully at scale,” says Grynsztejn. “The merging of her work with the shape and form of a speeding vehicle is truly an alignment of perfection.”
