Julie Mehretu’s Fast Car, from Paris to Venice

Julie Mehretu’s first car was a 1970s AMC Hornet. These days, she drives a sleek BMW through the bustling streets of New York—she’s also designed a race car for the luxury automaker. The Ethiopian-American painter is the 20th artist in the German car giant’s Art Car series to transform one of its race vehicles into a work of mobile art. The tradition started with Alexander Calder’s interpretation of a 3.0 CSL in 1975 and has gone on to feature those by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Esther Mahlangu, David Hockney, Robin Rhode, John Baldessari, and Jeff Koons. Most recently, Cao Fei transformed an MG GT3 into the manufacturer’s first digital car with a sleek black outfit in 2017. 

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At Centre Pompidou, a soaring shroud, surrounded by dancing lights and echoing beats, was lifted this past week afternoon to unveil Mehretu’s M Hybrid V8 baby. The 16-foot-long car is loyal to the artist’s whirlwind abstractions of blasting colors and absorbing compositions, a three dimensional statement by a true painter’s painter. “There are so many ideas around mobility today, including the smart phones we live with,” Mehretu tells Family Style. “I wanted to approach the conceptual idea of painting as something shifting.”

The innate sexiness of a razor sharp racing vehicle is not compromised in a mysteriously dark windshield, front lights with inviting squints, a muscular kinetic form, and a defined spoiler. Mobility of lives, histories, thoughts, and even geographies inhabit Mehretu’s often large scale, color-dense compositions. The artist’s mastery of alchemizing various forms of movement—migration, drift, wind—into layered paintings informs the car’s turbulent body. Taking her intellectual curiosities on movement to a literal form was a draw to the project, the artist shares. Working on the car during the height of the pandemic particularly resonated with her fascination with mobility. “We were all in the mode of sheltering; there was so much room for imagination,” she reflects. 

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Mehretu’s aerodynamic baby will soon reach high mileage on winding roads while speed envelopes its colorful body. The vehicle will compete in France’s prestigious 24 Hours Le Mans race next month. Attending the Daytona 500 last February with BMW was an eye-opener for Mehretu, who sensed the motorsports’ collaborative nature. “There was an enormous shared motivation for winning,” she says. A similar celebration of collectivity meanders through Mehretu’s ongoing blockbuster exhibition, “Ensemble,” at Palazzo Grassi in Venice. As the title suggests, the artist chose to gather her close friends to exhibit work, alongside over 50 works by herself, in her largest European survey to date. 

Similar to mechanics pumping air to the wheels against time at the pit stop and engineers communicating with the driver from the pit wall, the Venice exhibition is a fruit of equilibrium between friends. At the 18th century palace by the Grand Canal, works by Nairy Baghramian, David Hammons, Robin Coste Lewis, Paul Pfeiffer, Jessica Rankin, Tacita Dean, and Huma Bhabha accentuate Mehretu’s career journey through the power of creative exchange. Across the soaring building’s two floors, a whirlwind potpourri of colors and gestures by Mehretu sits steps away from Baghramian’s cast aluminum bronze and steel sculptures of eerie corporality. Elsewhere, Bhabha’s totemic cork, acrylic, oil, and MDF sculptures guard the painter’s energetic display of flashing rays and exploding colors.

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Everywhen, 2021-23—Mehretu’s ink and acrylic abstraction of wild gestures and strokes in neon hues as well as dark touches now hung at Palazzo Grassi—is a direct inspiration for her car. Two previous cars from the BMW Art Car tradition, however, were also instrumental in her approach: Frank Stella’s black and white 3.0 CSL from 1976 and Jenny Holzer’s 1999-dated v12 LMR that reads her signature expressions, such as “Protect me from what I want.” Stella was the only artist who also professionally raced cars, “and around the time he designed the car, he shifted towards three dimensional work,” Mehretu explains, “and Holzer’s expressions play with the spirit of what it means to win.” The complexities of gain and loss, as well as fall and rise and speed and pause, are wrapped around Mehretu’s version of a racing mobile—whether heading full speed to the finish line next month or glamorously parked under the flashlights at the Pompidou.