BMW’s Art Car Collection has spent the last year traveling around the world, but the brand has finally brought the entire family home. A new video from BMW takes viewers through all 20 Art Cars currently displayed at BMW Welt, marking the first time the complete collection has appeared together in one location.
The four-minute tour moves quickly, but the scale of the exhibition is immediately apparent. Twenty cars spanning nearly five decades of BMW history sit beneath the same roof, ranging from 1970s touring-car racers to production coupes, hydrogen-powered concepts, and modern endurance prototypes. BMW supplements the walkaround footage with archival clips of the artists explaining their work. Julie Mehretu discusses pushing the limits of what painting can be, while Indigenous Australian artist Michael Jagamara Nelson (also known as Kumantje Jagamara AM) describes incorporating stories passed down by his father into his E30 M3.
Around the 40-second mark, Robert Rauschenberg appears with the BMW 635 CSi he transformed in 1986. He describes the car as a kind of mobile museum and jokes that he would like to create “about 10 more, all different.” David Hockney then explains how he tried to remove the visual surface of the BMW 850 CSi, effectively painting the car’s inner mechanical components onto its exterior.
Fifty Years of BMW Art Cars
Other archival appearances include Roy Lichtenstein, whose BMW 320i Turbo used painted lines to emphasize movement, and Ken Done, who wanted his brightly colored M3 to feel like it was already moving while standing still. Jenny Holzer also appears to recall that she wanted women to participate in motorsport as something other than decoration. Her BMW V12 LMR carries phrases including “Protect Me From What I Want” across its bodywork.
The film also includes Andy Warhol, Olafur Eliasson, and several other artists who helped expand the project beyond conventional painted race-car liveries. Eliasson’s BMW H2R is especially difficult to ignore. The hydrogen-powered prototype had its original bodywork replaced with a reflective metal structure covered by layers of frozen water. The complete installation weighs roughly two metric tons and has been publicly assembled only a handful of times.
BMW’s video explores the exhibition in reverse chronological order. You’ll first encounter Mehretu’s BMW M Hybrid V8 and John Baldessari’s BMW M6 GTLM before working backward through the collection. The tour ultimately concludes where the entire idea began: Alexander Calder’s vividly painted BMW 3.0 CSL.
French racing driver and auctioneer Hervé Poulain originally approached Calder about creating the car, with support from then-BMW Motorsport boss Jochen Neerpasch. Poulain subsequently raced it at the 1975 24 Hours of Le Mans. What BMW initially viewed as a one-off experiment instead became one of the automotive world’s longest-running cultural projects. And while BMW isn’t the only automaker to blend art and automotive, it certainly might have the longest-running tradition. The BMW Welt exhibition runs through August 31, 2026. BMW Welt is open daily from 9 a.m. until 6 p.m. Since it is, after all, the first time ever BMW has brought all 20 cars out together, it’s probably worth checking out if you can.
First published by https://www.bmwblog.com
