BMW to debut BMW M Hybrid V8 Art Car this May

By Colin Wood
Feb 5, 2024 | BMW, Le Mans, art car, BMW Art Car, M Hybrid V8

Photography Courtesy BMW

This year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans will once again feature a BMW Art Car in the mix, the 20th Art Car to be made and the first Art Car to race since 2017.

Although the design won’t be officially unveiled until May 21, we do know that the canvas of choice is a BMW M Hybrid V8 prototype race car carrying the number 20, and the artwork will be completed by Ethiopian American contemporary visual artist Julie Mehretu.

“Julie Mehretu’s works engage us in a dynamic visual articulation of contemporary experience, a depiction of social behavior and the psychogeography of space,” the Marian Goodman Gallery explains, “most recently her paintings have incorporated photographic images from broadcast media which depict conflict, injustice, and social unrest.”

For the Art Car, BMW says that Mehretu is adapting the “colour and form vocabulary” of one of her more recent paintings, transferring the design onto the M Hybrid V8 using a “3D mapping technique.”

Mehretu had this to say in regards to her approach to the design:

“It wasn’t until after going to the 24 Hours race in Daytona last year that the idea of how to approach the BMW Art Car really crystallised. I was thinking about Frank Stella’s grid and how this could also be a shout-out to former BMW Art Car artists. And I kept thinking of this painting in my studio that I had just finished and the model of the Art Car was in my studio and I thought maybe we can try to have the car move through this painting. The creative play of what you can do in this new three-dimensional space and how many imaginations and inventions are played out to build it is highly instructive. It is not just the car itself but the designers and their deliberations as well as and foremost the drivers and their desires and aspirations which make it become this place of dreams where painting, conceptual art, aerodynamics, speed and aesthetics can participate.”