Brooklyn art collective MSCHF has turned a Lexus RZ 450e and an RX 450h+ into two surreal “Form Cars” for MOTOMORPHOSIS, a three-day exhibition during New York’s Armory Week.
Car makers usually spend years making their models look solid and planted. Lexus has now paid an art collective to do the opposite. Brooklyn-based MSCHF has bent one Lexus electrified vehicle into a loop and twisted another into a spiral. Both go on show in New York this week.
The exhibition is called MOTOMORPHOSIS. It runs from 24 to 26 September at Chelsea Industrial, during the city’s Armory Week. Lexus commissioned both works, and each sculpture sits next to the standard production car it is based on.
Two Cars and Their Doubles
The first piece, Circle Car , takes a Lexus RZ 450e and joins it nose to tail. The result is a car meant to drive round and round forever. (Range anxiety, solved.)
The second, Twisted Car , starts with the RX 450h+. Here the body is twisted hard along its length. Its lines and surface details are dragged around the spiral, as if the metal had turned to liquid.
Showing the originals next to their doubles is deliberate. MSCHF’s argument is that we never picture a car as a fixed object. In our minds, the image of a car is always tied to its ability to move.
Form Cars, Not Concept Cars
MSCHF calls these works “Form Cars” rather than concept cars. The difference is a tidy reversal. A real car is engineered to move, while these pieces are sculpted only to suggest movement.
The visual language comes from 3D animation. In animation, shapes squash and stretch through smear frames as they move, instead of keeping a fixed geometry. MSCHF often brings digital effects like this into the physical world, aiming for a sense of the impossible.
Lisa McQueen, senior manager of Lexus marketing, described the project as a change of subject. She said talk about electrification usually centres on how a vehicle is powered, while this show asks what electricity can power in our imagination. It’s a neat line, but this is still a marketing commission.
Please Don’t Try This at Home
Lexus includes a sensible disclaimer (as a race we are doomed). The vehicles are special project builds that use non-Lexus parts. These parts may void the warranty, reduce safety and make the cars illegal on the road. We doubt anyone planned to commute in a looped RZ, but it’s good to have it in writing.
An Unlikely Partnership
The pairing has some built-in irony. MSCHF describes itself as a collective that uses brands, objects and behaviours as its raw material. It says its work exposes the absurdity of cultural, political and monetary systems and sets out to subvert corporate structures. This time, a corporation paid for the work.
For Lexus, that tension may be the whole appeal. The show brings no new model, no pricing and no technical news. What it offers is rarer from a luxury brand: two everyday models in the range, bent out of shape on purpose and put in a gallery.
