Displaying items by tag: BMW

Starting in 2015, Art Basel and BMW will support emerging artists by awarding the BMW Art Journey, enabling them to go on their own journey of creative discovery. Functioning as a mobile studio, the BMW Art Journey can take artists almost anywhere in the world – to develop new ideas, discover new themes, and envision new creative projects.

The BMW Art Journey is open to artists who are showing in Positions and Discoveries, Art Basel's sectors for emerging artists in Miami Beach and Hong Kong. Two international expert juries, one for Positions and one for Discoveries, will determine a shortlist of three artists per sector and invite them to submit proposals for a journey to a destination of their choice.

In 2010, New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum embarked on a six-year project with the luxury automobile brand BMW. The BMW Guggenheim Lab was to include three 5,000 square feet pop-up structures that would travel in consecutive cycles to one location in the U.S., one in Europe and another in Asia. The architect-designed pieces were to remain in each location for 3 months, accompanied by Guggenheim curators who would helm programs for leaders in the fields of architecture, art, science, design, technology and education in an effort to curb issues relating to urban living.

The project’s first lab opened in Manhattan’s East Village in 2011 and attracted over 54,000 visitors. The project transformed a gritty, empty lot into a handsome community center designed by the Tokyo-based architecture firm, Atelier Bow-Wow. The Lab, which was the first and last for the project, traveled to Berlin and Mumbai following its stint in NYC.

BMW officials assured the public that the company will continue to be a global partner of the Guggenheim and that they are still considering future collaborations. The lab project, which was slated to last through 2016, was supposedly reconsidered due to “strategic shifts within the company” at BMW. The exhibition Participatory City: 100 Urban Trends from the BMW Guggenheim Lab will prematurely wrap up the project. The show will be presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York from October 11, 2013 through January 5, 2014.

Nobody does Art Cars quite like BMW. Others try, from time to time, sure. But over the past 40 years, the Bavarian automaker has collaborated with world-renowned artists to create no fewer than 17 unique art cars, each a work of art in its own right.

One of the things we love the most about BMWs art cars is that, as creative as they are, they're not just for show. Many of them have been raced, and raced hard – from the first 3.0 CSL painted by Alexander Calder (pictured above) to the latest M3 GT2 by Jeff Koons.

Unfortunately, while the cars have gone on display in galleries and museums around the world, seeing all 17 in one place is a rarity. So to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the art car program, BMW has put the entire collection online. Each car gets its own exhibit and film highlighting its creation, all laid out in a virtual museum.

hey all shared a medium: Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Alexander Calder, David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and 12 others. But it wasn't canvas. In fact, it was the metal surfaces of a group of BMW cars, and together, for more than 35 years, they created one of the most unusual and unlikely collections of all time.

These are the BMW art cars, a group of 17 works by those world-famous artists and other leaders in the pop art movement. While most of the great works by these geniuses hang stationary on walls or stands around the world, some of these works have actually taken the track at races like Le Mans.

But, fittingly, it began with a kinetic artist: Calder. Asked by his friend Herve Poulain in 1973 if he'd be interested in painting a race car, the world's most famous creator of mobiles decided to accept the challenge. "It had always been the dearest wish of [auctioneer and race driver Poulain] to add 'artistic beauty to an already perfect object such as a racing car,'" reads an official article put out by BMW about the art cars. "And this was in the middle of the oil crisis, too, a time when the automobile was viewed critically. [Poulain] acknowledged that it would need a 'genius' to realize his idea. He found him in Alexander Calder."

As someone who had along history with kinetic art, Calder could hardly pass up the opportunity to apply his unique style to something that had 430 horsepower. And when BMW got on board, offering up a 3.0 CSL racing coupe that could compete at Le Mans, the project was a go.

"The task of developing a large idea on a small scale was nothing new to Calder," the article continues. "In 1973, he had had a jetliner painted in a similar way [and soon Calder was] painting a model on a scale of 1 to 5."

The car debuted in Paris in 1975 , but it's real "baptism of fire" was Le Mans. Though it ran well in trials, the car was pulled from the race because of a technical malfunction. But it probably wasn't because of the paint.

Though the collection has been around for 35 years, growing to its current number of 17 when Koons applied his explosive interpretation to a BMW M3 GT2 in 2010, it has rarely all been together, and never before was displayed in full here in Munich, BMW's corporate home.

But now it is, and as part of Road Trip 2011, I got a chance to see (most of) the collection at the BMW Museum, where it is being showed through September 25. Koons' addition wasn't there, however, and neither was that of Olafur Eliasson, who in a statement about the effects of climate change, created an ice sculpture around a special BMW H2R concept engine in 2007. It's hard to keep ice around for four years, after all.

But most of the rest of the collection was on hand, and placed as it is at the top of the beautiful BMW Museum, it is a worthy close to any visitor's trip to this shrine to Germany automaking, and which is just across the street from the automaker's other shrine to its brand, BMW World, otherwise known in German as "BMW Welt."