BMW Art Cars: The Story of Art, Motorsport and the Extraordinary E21 Group 5
BMW E21 Group 5 Art car - created by The Syrup Room and Kustom Kolors - photographed for Historics Auctions
Explore the history of BMW Art Cars, from Alexander Calder and Andy Warhol to this extraordinary BMW E21 Group 5 Art Car photographed for Historics Auctioneers.
BMW Art Cars: When Cars Become Art:
There are cars that are designed to be beautiful.
There are cars that are designed to be fast.
And then there are cars that become something else entirely.
For more than 50 years, BMW has explored the space between the automobile, motorsport and contemporary art through its famous Art Car programme. What began with a racing driver, an idea and a BMW 3.0 CSL has become one of the most recognisable collaborations between the automotive and art worlds.
But the fascination doesn't stop with the official BMW Art Cars.
Sometimes the influence of those cars is just as interesting when it finds its way into the hands of enthusiasts, builders and artists.
That is exactly what happened with this extraordinary BMW E21 Group 5-inspired car, which I photographed for Historics Auctioneers.
BMW E21 Group 5 Art car - created by The Syrup Room and Kustom Kolors
Where art meets the automobile
The BMW Art Car story began in 1975.
French racing driver and auctioneer Hervé Poulain had an idea: take a racing car to Le Mans and have an artist transform it into a moving work of art.
BMW Motorsport boss Jochen Neerpasch supported the idea, and American artist Alexander Calder was invited to create the first car.
The result was a BMW 3.0 CSL covered in Calder's bold blocks of red, blue, yellow, black and white.
It wasn't simply a racing car with a different paint job. The car became the artwork.
And importantly, it went racing.
That combination of speed, engineering and creativity became the foundation for everything that followed.
The artists who followed read almost like a who's who of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art: Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Ernst Fuchs, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons and, most recently, Julie Mehretu.
Each brought a completely different visual language to the automobile.
Lichtenstein used his familiar graphic style to turn the BMW 320i into an illustration of movement and landscape. Warhol painted his M1 in broad, expressive strokes, attempting to capture the sensation of speed itself.
The BMW wasn't merely a canvas.
Its shape, engineering and purpose were part of the artwork.
BMW E21 Group 5 Art car - created by The Syrup Room and Kustom Kolors
The influence of Group 5
It is impossible to look at the E21 I photographed without thinking about another extraordinary period in BMW's motorsport history: Group 5.
The late 1970s and early 1980s produced some of the most outrageous-looking racing cars ever created. Huge wheel arches, extreme aerodynamic appendages, enormous rear wings and engines built for competition transformed relatively familiar road cars into something that looked barely connected to the cars in the showroom.
The BMW E21 became one of those cars.
Today, the combination of E21, Group 5 and Art Car has become an especially powerful visual formula.
And this particular car takes all three ideas and pushes them somewhere entirely its own.
BMW E21 Group 5 Art car - created by The Syrup Room and Kustom Kolors - 4.4 litre BMW M62 V8
An Art Car that isn't an Art Car
There is an interesting distinction here.
This isn't one of BMW's official Art Cars.
BMW's own collection contains 20 cars created in collaboration with internationally recognised artists, beginning with Calder's 1975 3.0 CSL.
Instead, the E21 is an interpretation of the idea.
The artwork was conceived by The Syrup Room, with the striking asymmetrical design deliberately avoiding the temptation to simply reproduce an existing BMW racing livery.
Colin Ware of Kustom Kolors then hand-painted the design.
That decision is important.
Rather than making another Jägermeister replica or copying one of the familiar BMW racing schemes, the team created something new.
It references BMW's history without being trapped by it.
The result is recognisable as an E21.
It is recognisable as a Group 5-inspired machine.
It has the visual language of an Art Car.
And it is also unmistakably its own thing.
BMW E21 Group 5 Art car - created by The Syrup Room and Kustom Kolors interior
From the race track to the road
The original BMW Art Cars were born from competition.
This E21 takes the visual language of those racing cars and brings it into a completely different environment.
It is road-going.
It can be driven.
And that changes the relationship between the car and its owner.
It isn't a sculpture sitting behind a rope in a gallery.
It is something that can be started, driven, parked outside a café and taken to a car show.
The car has subsequently appeared at events including Players Classic and Ultrace, where its combination of Group 5 aggression and Art Car-inspired graphics attracted considerable attention. It has also been featured by publications including Top Gear and Classic Driver, while BMW Group Classic featured the project and its creators on its Classic Heart podcast.
That perhaps brings us back to the original idea behind the BMW Art Cars.
Cars are designed to move.
Art is often designed to make us stop and look.
The Art Car sits somewhere between the two.
BMW E21 Group 5 Art car - created by The Syrup Room and Kustom Kolors
Fifty years and counting
In 2025, BMW celebrated 50 years of the Art Car programme, bringing together the 20 official BMW Art Cars created since 1975. The collection demonstrates just how far the original idea has travelled—from Calder's colourful 3.0 CSL to the more recent cars by artists including Jeff Koons, Cao Fei and Julie Mehretu.
Yet perhaps the most interesting measure of an idea's success isn't simply how many official examples exist.
It is how often other people are inspired to reinterpret it.
The E21 is one of those reinterpretations.
It takes the spirit of BMW Art Cars, the aggression of Group 5 racing and the creativity of a small independent workshop and combines them into something that couldn't have come from a BMW factory or an art gallery.
It had to come from enthusiasts.
And perhaps that is why it works.
Because ultimately, the most interesting cars aren't always the ones that simply preserve history.
Sometimes they are the ones that take a piece of it and create something new.
BMW E21 Group 5 Art car - created by The Syrup Room and Kustom Kolors
Its also been featured on Top Gear and many other UK media sites.
BMW E21 Group 5 Art car - created by The Syrup Room and Kustom Kolors
BMW E21 Group 5 Art car - created by The Syrup Room and Kustom Kolors - modern touch
BMW E21 Group 5 Art car - created by The Syrup Room and Kustom Kolors
