Bavarian auto giant BMW has revealed the 20th BMW Art car that will race at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France on June 15-16, 2024. The car in question is the #20 BMW M Hybrid V8 that features artwork created by renowned New York-based artist Julie Mehretu and has been described as a “performative painting.”
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The new #20 BMW M Hybrid V8 art car joins an expansive list of collaborations between the carmaker and artists globally in the BMW Art Cars series. BMW says that the latest art car brings space, movement and energy together, which have been the central motifs in Mehretu’s work. For the BMW Le Mans art car, the artist transformed a two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional representation, bringing dynamism into form.
The artist used the colour and form vocabulary of her painting “Everywhen” (2021 – 2023) as a starting point for her design. The abstract visual form comes from digitally altered photographs, which were superimposed in several layers of dot grids, neon-coloured veils and black markings.
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Mehretu explains that the idea for the art car stemmed from the thought of “What would happen if this car seemed to go through that painting and becomes affected by it?” The idea, the artist says was to make a mash-up of the painting.
BMW says the painting was realised onto the art car with the help of 3D mapping with which the motif was transferred to the contours of the vehicle.
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The #20 BMW M Hybrid V8 will compete in the 24 Hours of Le Mans in the hands of BMW M Motorsport works drivers Sheldon van der Linde (South Africa), Robin Frijns (Netherlands) and René Rast (Germany).
