Fusing virtuosity and mechanics, Fabian Oefner creates a surreal artwork from a 1972 Lamborghini being restored
By: Soumya Jain Agarwal
Posted on: February 18, 2019
M.A.D. Gallery – watchmaker MB&F’s division for nature-defying creations – has released yet another invention which astounded us into sheer admiration for creators who can imagine outlandish possibilities.
Presenting Fabian Oefner. And his mind-bending photograph of an exploding Lamborghini.
The Swiss Mr. Oefner fuses the fields of art and science, creating images which challenge time, space and reality. He creates fiction which seems like reality, but isn’t so in actuality.
And though he has created similar works with smaller models, this is the first time Mr. Oefner worked with a real car – an iconic Lamborghini Miura SV from 1972.
The creation of the image took almost two years. The car, which belonged to a friend of Mr. Oefner’s, was being restored by Lamborghini. Following it, Mr. 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 reconditioned. The final resulting image consists of more than 1,500 individual photographs, and a lot of sweat and precision.
When interviewed by the Lamborghini magazine, Mr. Oefner said, “I depended on the restoration times of the workshop and the challenge was to always keep in mind the vision that I had at the beginning…With the real car it got a lot more complicated: I was in the workshop where you’d have constant noise. Beside me, I had people working – and that was the most beautiful experience of this whole endeavor! – whom I was just asking, “Can I please have a little corner?” Also, keep in mind I did this in July, so it was 44°C in the workshop, I was sweating, and it smelled like gasoline in the air. It’s way more tangible when you do it with the real thing.”
Mr. Oefner now knows the inside-out of the car, literally, and has come to consider it as you would a friend. The artwork, which is symbolic of this relationship, is indeed a labor of ingenuity, visualization and extreme accuracy.
The image is available in two sizes - 140x70cm limited to 18 prints and 230x115cm limited to 8 prints – along with special artists, ranging in price from US$ 4,900 to 22,000.
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