The notorious Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF has struck again, this time turning its subversive creative lens toward the modern automobile. Commissioned by luxury automaker Lexus, the collective has taken two electrified production vehicles and subjected them to radical, jaw-dropping physical transformations that look as though they were ripped straight from a digital screen. The resulting full-scale sculptures, which treat heavy sheet metal, glass, and automotive lighting with the elastic logic of 3D animation, are set to make their public debut under the exhibition title MOTOMORPHOSIS at Chelsea Industrial in New York City. Running from September 24th through the 26th, 2026, during the bustling events of Armory Week, the showcase promises to challenge everything viewers think they know about automotive design, proportion, and motion.
The underlying premise of the project is immediately striking because it borrows from a familiar visual language deeply embedded in modern digital media. In traditional 2D and 3D animation, artists frequently rely on techniques such as "squash-and-stretch" and "smear frames" to make high-speed movement legible and expressive between one spatial position and the next. These exaggerated, temporary deformations trick the human eye into perceiving dynamic motion on a static screen. In MOTOMORPHOSIS, MSCHF has taken these fleeting optical illusions and rendered them permanent in physical reality. Solid sheet metal, normally stamped and reinforced for rigidity and crash safety, is made to appear as though it behaves like soft, pliable modeling clay, while windows, structural pillars, and light clusters stretch and bend fluidly along with the distorted body of each vehicle.
Circle Car Closes the Road Into an Endless Loop
At the heart of the exhibition is the newly unveiled Circle Car, which begins its life as a standard production Lexus RZ450e, an advanced battery-electric crossover. MSCHF takes this familiar vehicle and physically bends its entire length until the front nose meets the rear bumper, closing the car into a continuous, unbroken ring. The resulting sculpture appears permanently caught in an endless, self-consuming drive around its own absolute circumference.
Despite the radical nature of the transformation, the vehicle’s wheels remain distributed along the outside edge of the loop while the passenger cabin follows the sweeping curve. This delicate balance preserves just enough of the original car’s DNA and recognizable components to make the art collective’s surreal intervention feel strangely, unsettlingly plausible.
When displayed directly beside a standard, factory-fresh production RZ450e at Chelsea Industrial, the Circle Car serves as a profound visual critique of how deeply a modern vehicle’s identity is tied to conventional proportions and a strict forward-facing direction. Familiar design details remain strictly in place, yet their relationships to one another have been thoroughly scrambled. By bending the car into a closed loop, the design effectively absorbs the road itself into the object, leaving behind a paradoxical vehicle whose intended route begins and ends at the exact same geographic and structural point.
Twisted Car Turns Bodywork Into Permanent Torsion
While the Circle Car loops upon itself, MSCHF’s Twisted Car takes a different approach to automotive manipulation, utilizing the Lexus RX450h+ plug-in hybrid SUV as its canvas. In this piece, the vehicle is pulled through a dramatic longitudinal twist, with its entire body rotating violently around an invisible central axis running from front to back.
As the sheet metal spins, surface character lines follow the spiraling trajectory, and recognizable features are dragged along with them in a dynamic vortex. The finished sculpture looks as though the massive SUV has been frozen in time for a fraction of a second while being wrung out between two opposing, invisible mechanical forces. Windows, roof rails, and body panels all participate in this sweeping torsion, creating a dizzying visual effect that merges heavy industrial manufacturing with fluid digital manipulation.
To describe these creations, MSCHF has coined the term "Form Cars," positioning the sculptures as a deliberate and cheeky counterpoint to the traditional automotive concept car. While a standard concept car or production vehicle is meticulously engineered and wind-tunnel tested to move efficiently through physical space, MSCHF’s Circle Car and Twisted Car internalize that movement, transferring the kinetic energy directly into the static body of the sculpture itself. Neither of these machines needs to travel down a highway or accelerate off the line to convey motion; the speed and the forces of travel have already been permanently baked into their distorted shapes.
The upcoming exhibition during Armory Week will place these twisted, surreal creations side-by-side with their unaltered production counterparts, allowing audiences to witness firsthand the stark contrast between conventional industrial design and MSCHF’s boundary-pushing sculptural subversion. Through MOTOMORPHOSIS, the Brooklyn collective continues to interrogate the boundaries of mass-manufactured consumer objects, forcing observers to question the rigid geometries that define our daily mechanized environments.
