MOTOMORPHOSIS: MSCHF and Lexus explore what happens when a car stops being a car

During New York’s Armory Week, Brooklyn-based collective MSCHF and Lexus pushed the automobile into stranger territory with MOTOMORPHOSIS, a collaboration that recasts two production electrified vehicles as surreal sculptural doubles. Presented at Chelsea Industrial in Hudson Yards from September 24th to 26th, 2026, the exhibition placed functioning cars alongside distorted versions of themselves.

Car becoming an idea of movement

Commissioned by Lexus, MOTOMORPHOSIS draws on MSCHF’s practice of taking familiar forms beyond physical plausibility, borrowing from digital animation and its elastic language of squashing, stretching and distortion. A Lexus RZ 450e stood alongside Circle Car, an elongated version of the electric vehicle looped nose-to-tail into an endless ring. Its recognisable body becomes a continuous circuit, evoking a car perpetually chasing itself.

The Lexus RX 450h+ was paired with Twisted Car, whose body appears pulled into a dramatic longitudinal spiral. Its lines liquefy across the surface, stretching along the twisting axis like a machine caught mid-motion. MSCHF calls the sculptures “Form Cars” rather than “Concept Cars”, reversing a familiar industry term. While a concept car imagines what a vehicle might become, these production models have already become something else. They cannot drive, yet give tangible form to movement itself.

In this interview, MSCHF founders Kevin Wiesner, Lukas Bentel and Gabriel Whaley discuss the collective’s unconventional approach to art-making. They talk about everything from crossing disciplinary boundaries to embracing irony and absurdity. Read the full interview here.