On your way to a Patrick Nagel retrospective, but unsure of how to arrive? We may have a suggestion or two…

Through the collaboration between BMW and Italian customizer Garage Italia Customs, a couple of transportation offerings from this world to the far-off design landscapes of the 1980’s have emerged. And they pay homage to the Memphis Group, Ettore Sottsass and co.’s exercise in what happens when psychedelic sensibility becomes old enough to shuck its fluid surrealism and dispense with meaning altogether.

If the Beat poets and the intimate communication of improvisational jazz signaled a return to the idealistic social potentialities of the Romantic dreamers, then the psychedelic era was the full flowering of that resurgence. But for the Memphis Group there was no romance of social idealism, only the ideal of design for design’s sake; an antidote not only to the searching of the ‘sixties, but also to the pervasive sense of failure and apathy that plagued the ‘seventies. And a wake-up call, a design alarm-clock. Memphis group designs were fun, bold, disposable and…very visible.

The two Beemers are Memphis Group gone mobile. Jarring, playful and antagonizing, the Memphis-inspired designs are remarkably arresting. As each idea is subverted by the next, the whole becomes a continuous act of subversion. What is left, finally, is no substance at all, only surface. Nothing but the competition of color, visual texture, geometry and chance, inside and out.

But the i8 and i3 pictured here aren’t for the introvert. They’re for a Swatch collector gone wild.

Have a look and pick your favorite, if you dare.