Roy Lichtenstein’s Painted BMW Art Car Featured at Art Basel

Courtesy BMW AG.

BMW has announced that it will present cars painted by Roy Lichtenstein and Michael Jagamara Nelson at this year’s Art Basel in Miami Beach, according to a statement provided to artnet.

Lichtenstein’s car was driven at Le Mans in 1977 and later exhibited at the Centre Pompidou the same year. For an artist whose oeuvre frequently includes themes of speed and machinery, the 320 Group 5 series race car, with its 4-cylinder engine that tops out at 290 kilometers per hour, seems to have found an appropriate collaborator.

“I wanted the lines I painted to be a depiction the road showing the car where to go,” Lichtenstein said. “The design also shows the countryside through which the car has traveled. One could call it an enumeration of everything a car experiences, only that this car reflects all of these things before actually having been on a road,” Lichtenstein said.

This year’s other BMW art car, a 1989 M3 Group A series, features abstract landscape and wildlife scenes that artist Michael Jagamara patterned after aboriginal Papunya cultural traditions. Nelson, who emerged as a leading figure in the Papunya Tula art movement in Australia during the 1980s, has had installations featured at the Sydney Opera house and in front of the Australian parliament building in Canberra.

Both cars will be on view through December 7 at the Botanical Garden located next to the fair.

 


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