BMW has announced that a landmark exhibition of BMW Art Cars is due to take place from 29 July to 31 August.
Entitled BMW ARTS CARS – 20 ARTISTS, 50 YEARS OF INNOVATION. REUNITED AT BMW WELT, the exhibition, which will be showcased at BMW Welt in Munich, will bring together the 20 Art Cars of BMW in one place for the first time in the brand’s history.
Sandra Wittemer, Head of BMW Welt shared: “I am delighted that the BMW Art Car World Tour is ending here at BMW Welt. This exhibition enables our international visitors to experience the diversity of artistic approaches and technological developments over the last fifty years first-hand, and it reinforces BMW Welt’s role as a place of encounter.”
The event marks the final stage of the BMW Art Car World Tour, a travelling exhibition programme which has toured more than 30 countries across the globe since March 2025 in celebration of 50 years of the BMW Art Car collection. Over five continents, the world tour has seen the show attract visitors at global events, including Art Basel Hong Kong, Art Dubai, Contemporary Istanbul and many more.
BMW ARTS CARS – 20 ARTISTS, 50 YEARS OF INNOVATION. REUNITED AT BMW WELT will gather all of BMW’s “rolling sculptures”, or Art Cars, in one space, with five decades of art history represented in the vehicle’s designs, which span Minimalism, Pop Art, Magical Realism, Abstraction, Conceptual Art and more recently Digital Art. Since the first edition of the BMW Art Car in 1975 by Alexander Calder, artist such as Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Ernst Fuchs, Robert Rauschenberg, Michael Jagamara Nelson, Ken Done, Matazo Kayama, César Manrique, A.R. Penck, Esther Mahlangu, Sandro Chia, David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Olafur Eliasson, Jeff Koons, Cao Fei, John Baldessari and Julie Mehretu have been invited to create their designs.
Highlights of the exhibition include the BMW H2R Project by Olafur Eliasson, which has been displayed only three times to the public since its creation and Julie Mehretu’s BMW M Hybrid V8, (BMW Art Car #20) (2024), which saw the artist push beyond the physicality of the car as object, transforming the car into a performative installation while simultaneously co-founding the African Film and Media Arts Collective (AFMAC) with Mehret Mandefro to encourage artists from the African continent and the diaspora to seek out novel forms of artistic expression.
