ART / Fabian Oefner

ART

Fabian Oefner / Disintegrating Miura

Fabian Oefner`s work explores the boundaries between time, space and reality. He creates fictional moments and spaces, that look and feel absolutely real, yet aren’t. Through this, he dissects the different components of reality and gives us a clearer understanding of how we perceive and define it.

Inspired by science, Fabian’s approach to art is highly methodical and at the same time playful for unexpected moments to happen. He creates carefully orchestrated works, that are planned down to the last detail as well as pieces, that use a loose framework for art to happen.

In his highly acclaimed “Disintegrating” series, the artist portrays performance cars, that seem to blow apart. He creates these artificial moments in time by photographing every piece of the dismantled car individually and arranges them digitally into one photograph. Spending hundreds of hours on each piece, the photographs become a hyperrealistic rendition of a moment, that never existed.

For the first time, Fabian Oefner has created one of his highly acclaimed Disintegrating images with a real car. And not just any car: its the iconic Lamborghini Miura SV from 1972. The creation of the image took almost two years. During that time, Oefner and his team travelled to the workshops surrounding the Lamborghini Factory

in Sant’ Agata /Italy to capture each piece of the car, as it was being restored. The final image, consisting of more than 1500 pieces shows a new level of hyper-reality, that is unprecedented in the artist`s previous works.

Swiss artist Fabian Oefner is known for his Disintegrating series, which picks apart scale models of cars and features individual pieces for an incredible final image of what appears to be an exploding vehicle. For his newest work, Disintegrating X, Oefner was not only able to get his hands on a real car, but an iconic vehicle at that. A 1972 Lamborghini Miura SV—a car valued at $2 million—received Oefner’s signature treatment, and the results are as explosive as ever. Over the course of two years, Oefner took more than 1,500 photographs of each part of the Lamborghini. Working methodically, Oefner has created a hyperrealistic art piece that shows off the Lamborghini Miura in a way that’s never been seen. The work explores the boundaries between time, space, and reality by creating a moment that looks real, even though it isn’t. By working with a real vehicle, rather than a model, Oefner is continuing to push the limits of his art.

The photographer was given this unique opportunity by a friend who was in the process of restoring his Lamborghini Miura. Oefner didn’t hesitate when asked if he wanted to take advantage of the situation and use

the classic car to create a new piece. From there, Oefner set about visiting the Lamborghini factory in Italy to painstakingly photograph each piece

of the car. By suspending the parts from wires and ropes, Oefner is able to capture the image he’s after—each photograph becomes part of a bigger puzzle he puts together for the final photo collage.

In the end, we’re left with a dynamic photo composite where the Lamborghini seems to be in mid-explosion. As we zoom in, it’s possible to admire the beauty of its design and each part that goes into making it tick. For Oefner, this

unique experience gave him a different perspective on the Miura. “When I started working with this car, I was seeing it ‘just’ as the icon we all know, a Lamborghini Miura,” he shares. “But as the days went by, it became more and more special, and at the end of the process I knew every single detail of it. To me, it’s not just a Miura anymore, it’s become a bit like a person. Now it rolls on the road, finished and fully restored, and every time I see it I’m like, ‘Oh, I know you!’

Fabian told b500:

“It had always been my dream to create an art piece with a real car. One day, a friend said to me ‘I have a Miura, and I’m having it restored. Why don’t you take the opportunity to create one of your Disintegrating images?’ And of course he didn’t have to ask me twice to work on one of my favourite cars, to get to touch every single screw and piece of that legend, and put them into a final composition,”