Here's what an exploded car looks like

Automotive art crosses our desks almost daily here at One Autoweek Tower. Some of it's good, and some of it isn't as good, but once in a while, we see something that actually makes us stop and look. “Hatch” and “Disintegrating” by Swiss artist Fabian Oefner are two of those stop-and-look moments.

Fabian Oefner

“Disintegrating” is a series of photos--on display at the M.A.D. Gallery in Geneva starting Nov. 27-- that show an exploded view of a car in full color, similar to those exploded-view diagrams we see in our shop manuals.

“What you see in these images, is a moment that never existed in real life,” says Oefner. “What looks like a car falling apart is in fact a moment in time that has been created artificially by blending hundreds of individual images together. There is a unique pleasure about artificially building a moment… Freezing a moment in time is stupefying.”

Oefner sketches the designs on paper, noting where each part should go. He then takes the car models apart—they're models, by the way—and places each piece with needles and thread. He has to work out the angles and the lighting, and each finished piece requires thousands of photos.

“These are possibly the 'slowest high-speed' images ever captured,” says Fabian. “It took almost two months to create an image that looks as if it was captured in a fraction of a second. The whole disassembly in itself took more than a day for each car due to the complexity of the models. But that's a bit of a boy thing. There's an enjoyment in the analysis, discovering something by taking it apart, like peeling an onion.”

Hatch is what Oefner imagines what a car being born would look like.

“Hatch” is Oefners interpretation of how cars might be born. Some images show white, car-shaped shells. Others have a car breaking out along with a smashed shell. Oefner says that he had to create several dozen shells to get the shot just right. To capture the shell hitting the car, Oefner rigged his camera with a microphone and set it to be triggered by the noise.

Each piece is limited edition, and they cost about $2,100 converted from Swiss Francs. Check out more of Oefner's work and other pieces at the M.A.D. Gallery.

Fabian Oefner

By Jake Lingeman