BMW Art Car exhibition closes with over 120,000 visitors

BMW has wrapped up its anniversary exhibition “BMW Art Cars – 20 Artists, 50 Years of Innovation. Reunited at BMW Welt”, which drew more than 120,000 visitors to Munich between 29 July and 31 August 2026. It was the first time all 20 Art Cars had been shown together in one place. The display closed the BMW Art Car World Tour, a global programme that has marked the collection’s 50th anniversary since March 2025.

BMW Welt in Munich has closed the doors on the largest gathering of BMW Art Cars ever staged. Between 29 July and 31 August 2026, more than 120,000 people visited free of charge to see all 20 of the so-called rolling sculptures side by side for the first time, from Alexander Calder’s 1975 original through to Julie Mehretu’s 2024 contribution.

All 20 cars in one room

The centrepiece for many was Olafur Eliasson’s “BMW H2R Project”, an artwork built around a hydrogen-powered prototype. It was shown publicly as a complete “frozen” installation for the fourth time since its world premiere in 2007.

“Over the past few weeks, more than 120,000 visitors have demonstrated how art can bring people together and inspire them. It was especially rewarding to see people of all ages discover these unique vehicles. This tremendous response also highlights the special appeal of BMW Welt as a meeting place for culture, design, society and the automobile,” says Sandra Wittemer, Head of BMW Welt.

The collection moves onto the screen

With the exhibition over, BMW is shifting part of the collection into digital form. From 30 September 2026, the BMW Welt App will carry material on how the Art Cars were created and how the collection developed across five decades, including image and video content.

More unusually, the cars are also making their way into production models. In the new BMW Panoramic iDrive, five selected Art Cars can be added as widgets to the configurable display of BMW Panoramic Vision, the system that projects content across the full width of the windscreen from A-pillar to A-pillar. BMW says the feature will be available in almost all markets.

The five cars offered are Ken Done’s BMW M3 Group A (#8, 1989), César Manrique’s BMW 730i (#10, 1990), A.R. Penck’s BMW Z1 (#11, 1991), Esther Mahlangu’s BMW 525i (#12, 1991) and David Hockney’s BMW 850 CSi (#14, 1995).

Where to see them next

The cars will keep travelling in changing combinations. From 3 September, Art Car #6 by Robert Rauschenberg goes on display at the BMW Museum in Munich. Julie Mehretu’s Art Car #20 heads to Cape Town in December for the African Film and Media Arts Collective (AFMAC), an initiative the artist set up together with the BMW Group. The exhibition “Turning Towards the Sun” runs at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa from 11 December 2026 to 15 August 2027.

Fifty years of painted race cars

The collection dates back to 1975, when French racing driver and art auctioneer Hervé Poulain and Jochen Neerpasch, then head of BMW Motorsport, asked Alexander Calder to turn a race car into an artwork. The resulting BMW 3.0 CSL ran at the 24 Hours of Le Mans that year and became a crowd favourite. Twenty works later, the list of contributors includes Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Esther Mahlangu, David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Cao Fei and Julie Mehretu.

What it means

The Munich show ended the biggest exhibition project in the collection’s history. Since March 2025, the World Tour made 60 stops in more than 30 countries across five continents and, according to BMW, attracted more than two million visitors in total. Venues ranged from Art Basel Hong Kong, Art Dubai and Auto Shanghai to the 24 Hours of Le Mans and Le Mans Classic, the Louwman Museum in The Hague, Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance and The Bridge in the United States, Contemporary Istanbul, the Zoute Grand Prix in Belgium, the ADI Design Museum in Milan, Rétromobile in Paris, the RAD Art Fair in Bucharest and the Market Art Fair in Stockholm. Later stops before Munich included the Classic Car House in Copenhagen, the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este on Lake Como and the Munich Opera Festival.

For a manufacturer, cultural programmes of this scale are as much brand-building as patronage — but the Art Car project is unusual in having run for half a century, and in putting genuine competition machinery in the hands of major contemporary artists.

The exhibition ended on 31 August 2026; the digital content arrives in the BMW Welt App from 30 September 2026.

Source: www.press.bmwgroup.com