The Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF has long built a reputation for turning familiar everyday objects into uncanny, headline-grabbing anomalies. Whether they are inflating cartoonish red boots to near-comical proportions or shrinking luxury handbags down to a microscopic scale visible only through a microscope lens, the collective thrives on challenging the boundaries of perception and physical scale. For their latest ambitious experiment in spatial and formal distortion, MSCHF has chosen a considerably larger and more complex subject: a pair of production vehicles courtesy of luxury automaker Lexus.
Commissioned by Lexus for MOTOMORPHOSIS, a striking new exhibition opening during New York’s bustling Armory Week, MSCHF has transformed a Lexus RZ 450e electric SUV and a Lexus RX 450h+ plug-in hybrid into a pair of physical automotive sculptures that look less like fabricated metal and more like digitally manipulated pixels. Each altered vehicle is exhibited directly alongside its standard, unmodified production counterpart, a curatorial choice that makes the dramatic extent of MSCHF’s physical transformations immediately apparent to viewers.
The modifications playfully toy with the geometry of modern car design. The fully electric RZ 450e has been completely reimagined as Circle Car. In this striking sculpture, the body of the vehicle is stretched, curved, and seamlessly looped until the front bumper and the rear end meet in a continuous, uninterrupted circle. Meanwhile, the RX 450h+ undergoes an entirely different kind of physical contortion to become Twisted Car. In this iteration, the vehicle rotates dramatically along its longitudinal axis, pulling its windows, doors, side panels, and sharp body lines into a striking, dynamic spiral that challenges conventional understandings of automotive architecture.
While both installations might at first glance resemble wild, futuristic concept cars plucked from the floor of an especially surreal auto show, MSCHF has chosen to categorize them under a different moniker: "Form Cars." This clever designation completely flips the conventional concept-car exercise on its head. Rather than utilizing an experimental vehicle platform to explore emerging powertrain technology, advanced aerodynamics, or future interior utility, the collective treats the existing, mass-produced automobile primarily as a pure form to be manipulated, warped, and critiqued.
This unconventional approach draws heavily from the digital tools and workflows that contemporary designers and animators routinely use behind computer screens. Operations such as stretching, bending, warping, and twisting an object in three-dimensional space are relatively mundane, everyday tasks inside modern 3D software applications, even when those operations produce abstract geometries that would appear completely absurd and structurally impossible in the physical world.
MSCHF also draws direct inspiration from the concept of "squash and stretch" long utilized in traditional 3D animation, where inanimate forms temporarily distort through exaggerated "smear frames" to communicate motion, speed, and energetic action. MOTOMORPHOSIS effectively freezes that digital visual shorthand, capturing ephemeral movement and granting it heavy, permanent physical mass.
Exhibiting these distorted sculptures side-by-side with intact, road-ready versions of the vehicles reinforces a compelling contradiction. One object is meticulously and carefully engineered by industrial designers to move efficiently through physical space, featuring drag-reducing aerodynamics and functional cabins. Its distorted double, on the other hand, is completely static and entirely non-functional, yet it visually communicates motion, energy, and velocity far more emphatically than its operational counterpart.
The collaboration represents a unique intersection between avant-garde art provocation and corporate automotive marketing, pushing both parties into unfamiliar territory.
"Most conversations about electrification focus on how a vehicle is powered. MOTOMORPHOSIS asks a different question: What can electricity power in our imagination?" says Lisa McQueen, senior manager of Lexus marketing, reflecting on the conceptual roots of the project. "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 is currently on view to the public at Chelsea Industrial in New York City through September 26, 2026.
