The M3 is the evolution of BMW’s E30 platform having an S14, straight-4 DOHC (Double Overhead Cam) petrol engine.

Initiated by BMW’s Motorsport director Jochen Neerpasch and well known French car racing driver Herve Poulain, the BMW Art Car Project is a space that invites well known and unique painters to use a BMW as its canvas. Poulain first asked his friend and artist Alexander Calder in 1975 to make the first one. It was a BMW 3.0 CSL that Poulain himself raced at the 1975 LeMans race.

From 1975 until 2016, 19 painters have created BMW Art cars. This was the 8th car in series and was painted in 1989.

This model was done by the famous Australian native painter Michael Nelson Tjakamarra who transformed a black colour BMW M3 Group A race version car into an art object by incorporating Papunya art (an aboriginal art style), also known as ‘dot’ painting.  It took Tjakamarra 7 days to complete this hand-painted project. 

Tjakamarra who was born in 1949 in an aboriginal family, learned this ancient method of painting from his grandfather. Papunya artists usually paint figures in geometric patterns that symbolizes landscapes such as caves, streams, trees and animals such as ants, emu’s (ostrich like bird) and kangaroo's. 

In this car, Tjakamarra painted art that includes a tree-dwelling Australasian marsupial called possum, water body as well as a kangaroo when viewed from the sky.

An extremely rare collectible whose value is increasing with time.