2025 is an enormous milestone yr for BMW. Since beginning its iconic BWM Artwork Automotive program 5 many years in the past, the collection has offered artists with a fascination by cars an ideal playground to mix artwork and design with motorsport and engineering.
In celebration of fifty years, the BMW Artwork Automobiles can be taking a world tour, first kicking off in Europe on March 20 earlier than coming to Asia. A part of the presentation will see the BMW Artwork Automobiles created by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney and Jeff Koons can be on show on the Museum of Utilized Arts and the SPARK Artwork Truthful in Vienna for the BMW Group Niederlassung Wien occasion “(R)Evolution of Artwork.” The newest and twentieth BMW Artwork Automotive – the BMW M Hybrid V8 by famend American painter Julie Mehretu – can be displayed at Artwork Basel in Hong Kong on 28-30 March. Previous examples of the artwork automobile embrace Warhol’s iteration for the fourth automobile, Artwork Automotive 14 by Hockney, seventeenth by Koons and extra. The BMW Artwork Automobiles, sometimes called “rolling sculptures” or “artwork on wheels” have captivated audiences globally, that includes in museums, galleries, and cultural establishments worldwide.
In an unique dialog with Prof. Dr. Thomas Girst, BMW Group’s International Head of Cultural Engagement since 2003, he offers BWM Artwork Automotive followers an introspective take a look at how the collection has redefined inventive innovation within the automotive business.
Hypebeast: How has the BMW artwork vehicles challenge developed over the previous 50 years, and what have been a number of the most notable milestones alongside the way in which?
Dr. Thomas Girst: For greater than 5 many years, BMW has collaborated internationally with most of the most famed cultural establishments, initiating a whole lot of long-term tasks worldwide. Our focus of our firm’s long-term dedication is on up to date artwork, music, movie, structure and design. In all cultural actions, BMW ensures absolute inventive freedom – an important principal for groundbreaking inventive and for making a profitable enterprise.
We do that as a result of we consider that our engagement within the arts is prime to return one thing to society. It’s a stability between a accountable company citizen and model constructing – each of which form how our model is perceived by stakeholders. Immediately, an organization’s status is not only outlined by monetary efficiency but in addition by its values and contributions to society. What can we give again to the communities the place we do enterprise?
Artwork may be very a lot intertwined with our merchandise. In the event you take the all-electric BMW i7, for instance: with the press button, its show transforms right into a Digital Artwork Mode, designed by the good Chinese language up to date artist Cao Fei – who additionally created one of many iconic BMW Artwork Automobiles. We collaborate with Academy Award winner Hans Zimmer, to work with our Sound Design to develop particular drive sounds for all our BMW electrical autos. We name this BMW – IconicSounds Electrical.
From the invention of the auto nearly 150 years in the past, artists have been fascinated by vehicles and mobility. In 1909, the Futurist manifesto on the entrance web page of Le Figaro hailed the automobile, its velocity and its sound, as the brand new sculpture for the twentieth Century. Within the 1920’s already the French artist Sonja Delaunay designed vehicles and matching garments. The BMW Artwork Automobiles add to this superb historical past and trajectory, involving a number of the best artist of the late twentieth and early twenty first Centuries.
What’s the choice course of like for selecting artists to collaborate on BMW artwork vehicles, and the way do you guarantee variety and innovation in these partnerships?
BMW Artwork Automobiles are three phrases that stand for the legendary fusion of BMW automobile icons and world-famous artists comparable to Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney or Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer Esther Mahlangu and Julie Mehretu.
The initiative didn’t start with PR and advertising and marketing colleagues placing their heads collectively pondering of how one can introduce our model into the humanities. It began in 1975 when French racing driver Hervé Poulain had the visionary thought of fee an artist to design on his racing automobile. The trajectory of this iconic collection has its roots proper on the racetrack. Nobody may have predicted what it was the beginning of essentially the most constant fusion of cars and artwork ever seen. Everybody concerned about design, within the arts, in motorsports and racing, in expertise and tradition – creating prompt enthusiasm for a lot of! The idea is straightforward but extraordinary: a globally famend artist is invited to remodel a BMW right into a one-of-a-kind masterpiece. It’s a novel dialogue between the artist and this contemporary canvas, a dialog between his or her vison and our engineers, designers, and racedrivers. An alternate of concepts on the heart of true co-creation. A automobile will not be a typical medium for an artist, and it might be argued that it pushes artists in a approach {that a} extra conventional possibility, comparable to a canvas, wouldn’t. Artists don’t must sing our music, artists could be essential of sure facets of mobility, and we worth this alternate as a lot as we worth their dedication and pleasure.
To reply your query: For the BMW Artwork Automotive artists, for the previous 20 years, there’s a jury course of in place the place we get to suggest the automobile however the choice committee, comprised of museum administrators and chief curators from world wide (from Koyo Kouoh to Anita Dube, from Stefanie Rosenthal to Madeleine Grynzstein, from Hans Ulrich Obrist to Massimiliano Gioni to Cecilia Alemani and the late Okwui Enwezor – the jury is at all times altering) who alone make the choice. We wish to have an open and clear course of the place not ourselves however the nice educated folks throughout the artwork world get to determine who ought to create the following BMW Artwork Automotive. The vote for Julie Mehretu was unanimous!
In what methods do BMW artwork vehicles mirror the intersection of artwork, expertise, and automotive design, and the way has this fusion contributed to the legacy of the challenge?
The programme initially centered on racing vehicles, but it surely’s developed to incorporate collection manufacturing fashions too, particularly when the BMW Group grew to become a really world firm within the 80S and 90s. Every BMW Artwork Automotive is a priceless unique owned by BMW and showcased within the firm’s museum in Munich or at prestigious cultural occasions world wide.
Artwork vehicles are not about artists wielding brushes. We embrace the newest applied sciences, each within the arts in addition to in our core enterprise. Already in 2017, Cao Fei made use of Augmented and Digital Actuality as a part of her Artwork Automotive challenge and in. Already in 2021, we blended artwork and algorithms by creating the “Final AI Masterpiece” with the BMW 8 collection Grand Coupe as a canvas. In 2024, we launched the twentieth Artwork Automotive in Paris, France, which is designed by New York based mostly artist Julie Mehretu. She used the BMW M Hybrid V8 race automobile, which competed within the 24 Hours of Le Mans in June 2024. Julie’s design was impressed by the query: What would a portray appear to be if the automobile have been to drive by it and have become a part of the work itself? It’s a performative portray.
Are you able to focus on any particular challenges or successes encountered in bridging the worlds of artwork and automotive business by the BMW artwork vehicles program?
As an integral half his BMW H2R Artwork Automotive “Your cell expectations”, based mostly on a report breaking racecar solely operating on hydrogen, Ólafur Elíasson edited a guide on the way forward for the auto which our chief designer became necessary studying for a whole lot of his colleagues. With the BMW Artwork Automotive, there are at all times challenges – which we try to clear up collectively. Jeff Koons was desperate to pursue lenticular foiling however couldn’t add to the load or the aerodynamics of the race automobile in order to not compromise its possibilities of successful. Cao Fei needed the blackest black for her automobile to have the ability to run AR on one more artist had the rights for Vantablack absorbing nearly all mild and didn’t wish to share it along with her on the time. Whenever you attempt for the perfect, roadblocks are what maintain you going and we at all times discovered a approach for the perfect outcomes doable and making the artist’s imaginative and prescient come true!
What function do you consider BMW artwork vehicles play in shaping the cultural identification and status of the BMW model globally, and the way do you measure the impression of those collaborations?
We think about the BMW Artwork Automobiles a sub-brand. They’re goodwill ambassadors irrespective of the place they’re being proven world wide, mother and father dragging their youngsters, and – even higher! – the opposite approach round. The BMW Artwork Automobiles should not solely on the epicenter of our cultural engagement however they’re additionally a part of the DNA of our core enterprise. How do you measure one thing priceless? Perhaps by all the opposite manufacturers wanting in as effectively! Copy apparently is the best from of praise. As leaders within the subject, we take the excessive highway.
Wanting again on the previous 50 years of BMW artwork vehicles, are there any specific collaborations or artworks that stand out to you as significantly groundbreaking or influential?
To me personally it’s the best privilege of my function at BMW to have the ability to work with artists of such world renown for an extended time period. Whether or not it’s hugging 6ft 7in John Baldessari, discussing nineteenth Century ukiyo-e Japanese woodprints with Julie Mehretu or studying from Jeff Koons that each human being on this planet is born a winner as we have now already succeeded within the greatest doable competitors going down in our mom’s womb. Naming a favourite BMW Artwork Automotive is not possible for me, it’s as if somebody would ask me which certainly one of my three youngsters is my most beloved. Each automobile stands out to me and Alexander Calder’s major coloration 1975 BMW 3.0 CSL is actually the nucleus of all of them. To me it’s fascinating how they inform a narrative amongst one another, how they’re better collectively than their particular person elements. Jeff Koons’ M3 GT2 beginning quantity is 79. The yr through which Warhol’s M1 raced in le Mans. Not a coincidence. Hockney reveals the within of the automobile on its outdoors, the opposite approach round from Lichtenstein’s – which in his typical Benday-dot fashion reveals every part the automobile could encounter, together with a setting solar on one facet and a rising solar on the opposite. He’s paying homage to the 24 Hours race of Le Mans, identical to Jenny Holzer’s, along with her truism “Shield me from what I Need” lighting up in fluorescent inexperienced at evening. And inside Julie Mehretu’s automobile, in her personal phrases, there’s a shout-out embedded to Frank Stella’s automobile of 1976!
