BMW i8 Gains A Colorful Look For The Sake Of Art

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.

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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.

As for genuine BMW art cars, these date back to 1975. The first one was a 3.0 CSL customized by Alexander Calder. Since then, numerous such vehicles wearing the Munich-based company’s logos were born and some of these, in return, inspired others, like the i8 Roadster ‘4 Elements’, made by Czech artist Milan Kunc, which you can check out here.