I’m a real sucker for artists who use cars as their subject of choice—especially the ones who manage to do something unconventional with their ideas. The artist usually has a really neat process and a different way of looking at cars than the average enthusiast. And that’s where Fabian Oefner comes in.
Oefner is a Swiss artist whose work blends science and art in ways that are, frankly, really damn cool. That’s where his “Disintegrating” series comes in: It’s a series of works depicting performance cars disintegrating into their tiniest mechanical components. It highlights all the parts and all the work that goes into what we often think of as a single machine. It’s an awesome series—you can check out more of his “Disintegrating” series here.
But what makes “Disintegrating X,” Oefner’s composite photo of a 1972 Lamborghini Miura SV so special? It was the first time he worked with an actual, physical car.
See, Oefner started out the series using scale models. Yeah. Those hyperrealistic composite images lining his resumé didn’t even use the whole car in question. I mean, yes, the man was using the really super expensive models that are as accurate as looking at the real thing. But it’s kind of mind blowing to imagine how tedious it would be working with such a tiny representation.
The Miura was a friend’s car. He offered Oefner free rein to photograph every single part of the Miura when he took it in to be restored. As you can imagine, Oefner snatched up the opportunity to work with the actual thing he would depict in his final works.
The final image of the Miura took almost two years to complete and is composed of 1,500 separate images all edited together to create the final work according to the YouTube description. That’s a hell of a lot of dedication—but I gotta say, the final product definitely made that effort worthwhile.