When Julie Mehretu was commissioned to design the 20th BMW Art Car, one of her first courses of action involved seeing the vehicle—the BMW M Hybrid V8—in motion at a race in Daytona. The Ethiopian-born painter quickly realized that automotive design shares quite a few commonalities with her own practice, which explores themes like capitalism, war, diaspora, climate change, and revolution through the lenses of architecture and movement, often all at once. “Designers, engineers, aerodynamicists, and so many other creative minds are working on taking this vehicle to the extreme,” Mehretu says. Her idea was simple: imagine the BMW blasting through one of her paintings, which acts as a portal and transforms the car into something else entirely.
“The idea was to make a remix, a mash-up of the painting,” Mehretu says. “I kept seeing that painting kind of dripping into the car.” The work in question, called Everywhen and inspired by a photograph of the Capitol insurrection in 2021, was fresh on Mehretu’s mind, owing partially to its inclusion in a current retrospective at Venice’s Palazzo Grassi. To translate the canvas’s swirling color gradations onto the car, she superimposed digitally altered photographs of it with layers of dot grids, neon-colored veils, and the black markings typical of her work. She utilized 3D mapping to imbue motifs of digitization, glitches, and vibration across the car’s contours. The markings are clearly visible when the car is still but seamlessly blur in motion.
