It’s not unusual
for BMW to commission different artists when it comes to their art car
projects. However, this particular vehicle was not commissioned by the Bavarian
automaker. Described as “an independent experiment in form and color”, the i8
is owned by a friend of Thomas Scheibitz, the artist behind it, who turned to
his small-scale painting created two years ago for inspiration. The hybrid
sports car thus features scanned and enlarged fragments of the painting on the
outside, in different contexts.
Scheibitz, who’s
also a Professor of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dusseldorf,
Germany, presented it to the public last Saturday, at his Berlin studio.
“Radical content is a question of form. Traditional sculptural concerns such as
visual perspectives, detailed imagery, spatial perspectives, qualities of
reliefs, symmetry as well as dissolved symmetry and illusion were the starting
points for my design of a body of a modern vehicle”, he said.
Unlike similar vehicles,
which are sometimes sold either for profit or for a noble cause, this
unofficial BMW i8 ‘art car’ won’t change hands any time soon.
