MSCHF, the Brooklyn-based conceptual art collective represented by Perrotin, will debut a pair of surreal new car sculptures in New York this week as part of a collaboration with Lexus.
The works reconfigure two of the automaker's electrified vehicles for the exhibition “Motomorphosis,” which opens this week at Chelsea Industrial during Armory Week. The show pairs each unaltered vehicle with its distorted double. A Lexus RZ450e appears once as itself and again as Circle Car, looped nose-to-tail into an endless, driving circle, while a Lexus RX450h+ is shown alongside Twisted Car, its body pulled into dramatic longitudinal torsion.
MSCHF describes the works as “Form Cars,’ positioned as an inversion of the automotive industry’s "Concept Car" prototypes. Kevin Wiesner, the collective's chief creative officer and a founding member, told Highsnobiety the project drew on the vocabulary of 3D animation, where forms bend and stretch without being fixed, as well as on a lineage of car-as-medium artworks in the United States, such as Pippa Garner's sculpture and performance Backwards Car (1974). “We had the idea of inverting the Concept Car and taking a purely Formalist approach to the object,” Wiesner said.
Despite their seemingly impossible shapes, the sculptures were built using conventional auto-body techniques—a steel armature built up with thousands of individual pieces, then finished with the paint and Bondo overcoat typical of a body shop. Some components, Wiesner said, are actual Lexus parts, "but they're sculptures, not cars."
Lexus has framed the collaboration around what it calls "Electric Made Art," treating electrification itself as an artistic medium rather than a purely functional one. "Most conversations about electrification focus on how a vehicle is powered. ‘Motomorphosis’ asks a different question: what can electricity power in our imagination?" said Lisa McQueen, Lexus's senior manager of marketing. "Working with MSCHF allowed us to take the automobile beyond its familiar form and explore movement, transformation and possibility in an entirely new way."
“Motomorphosis” will have a public opening the evening of Thursday, September 24th, and will be on view Friday, September 25th, and Saturday, September 26th.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/57Gclpk
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