MSCHF Twists Lexus EVs Into Sculptures That Cannot Drive

MSCHF has bent a Lexus RZ 450e into a closed ring and twisted an RX 450h+ into a spiral for a three-day New York show. Lexus paid for both works. They open at Chelsea Industrial on September 24, 2026, beside the production SUVs they were taken from.

Neither sculpture can drive. Speed is the shape now.

The Circle That Never Leaves the Spot

Circle Car starts with the all-electric RZ 450e and joins the nose to the tail until the body is a continuous loop. Wheels stay on the outer edge. The cabin follows the curve, so the thing still reads as a Lexus, just one whose road has been swallowed into the object.

Kevin Wiesner, MSCHF’s chief creative officer and a founding member, said the ring comes from a motion everyone already knows. “The circle derives most clearly from the motions of a vehicle, a car doing donuts implies this shape,” he said. The gag is built in. “No matter how much it drives it remains in one place chasing its own tail.”

Stretched door handles run far past any usable pull. Glass and lamps follow the bend instead of sitting in their old cutouts. Parked next to a stock RZ 450e, the loop makes plain how much of a car’s identity is just proportion and a sense of forward.

Twisted Car Starts as a Software Accident

Twisted Car takes the RX 450h+ plug-in hybrid and rotates the body around a line through its length. Surface creases, the spindle grille, and the window graphic get dragged along the helix, as if the SUV were wrung once and then left that way.

Wiesner described that degree of twist as the sort of move a 3D program spits out when someone over-cranks a tool. “Twist Car is one of those shapes that is taken directly from 3D software operations, though this degree of twist usually shows up as a visually compelling mistake,” he said.

The spiral is complete enough that it can pass, at a glance, for a factory body style. It is not. Lexus materials on the project warn that the pieces are special vehicles modified with non-Lexus parts that may void warranty, negatively impact safety, and not be street legal. There is no price because there is no car to buy.

What a Form Car Is

A Form Car, in MSCHF’s term, is a production vehicle treated as material instead of as a proposal for the next model year. Wiesner said the group inverted the industry’s concept-car habit and took a purely formal run at the object, using the twist, stretch, and bend commands that are ordinary in digital tools and absurd in steel.

We had the idea of inverting the Concept Car and taking a purely Formalist approach to the object.

Kevin Wiesner, chief creative officer, MSCHF

A concept car still pretends it might be driven later. Circle Car and Twisted Car have already spent their motion. Wiesner said some pieces use actual Lexus parts, and that cars are convenient because they are built to come apart, so nose and tail bits can be bolted onto sculptural frames. The works still cannot travel. They stay, in his phrase, tied to the car’s capacity for movement in the mind.

He pointed to a U.S. lineage of cars used as art, and named Pippa Garner’s Backwards Car. In 1974 Garner reversed the body of a 1959 Chevrolet so it looked as if it were heading the wrong way while it rolled forward. She took it across the Golden Gate Bridge for pictures, then had the car destroyed. MOTOMORPHOSIS keeps the joke and drops the drive.

THE LINE THAT RUNS TO CHELSEA

1. 1974: Pippa Garner reverses a 1959 Chevrolet so it appears to drive backward, then scraps the car after the pictures are made.
2. 2016: MSCHF forms in Brooklyn and starts issuing drops that treat consumer goods as raw material.
3. 2022: The group sells 1,000 keys, at $18 each, that all open one 2004 Chrysler PT Cruiser, then turns the car loose.
4. 2023: Big Red Boots go on sale at $350; more than 20,000 pairs sell, and the cartoon shape leaves the studio.
5. September 24, 2026: MOTOMORPHOSIS opens with Circle Car and Twisted Car beside two unaltered Lexus SUVs.

The PT Cruiser stunt already treated a car as a shared object rather than a private machine. The Lexus job goes further. The vehicles do not leave the room.

Join Thousands of Pieces, Then Paint

The warped bodies look like clay. The shop process is closer to collision repair at an impossible scale. Wiesner said the finish, paint, and overcoat follow a standard auto-body sequence, Bondo included, even though the underlying shape does not.

HOW THE SKIN WAS MADE

• The frame: Each sculpture starts on a steel armature, not on a rolling Lexus chassis left intact.
• The skin: Thousands of separate pieces are joined like LEGO bricks to build the stretched and twisted outer surface.
• The finish: Body filler, paint, and overcoat are applied the way a shop would finish a repaired panel.
• The donor parts: Front and rear Lexus pieces are mounted onto the sculptural bodies wherever the original car can still be read.
• The hard part: Wiesner said the real trouble is joining those methods at this size and making the finished works movable for install.

Asked how much of the original Lexus had to remain, he said, “As much as possible!” Recognition is the point. If the loop and the helix stopped looking like the RZ and the RX, the before-and-after on the gallery floor would collapse.

The Electric Made Art Brief

Lexus did not wander into this. The project site frames MOTOMORPHOSIS inside a brand line called Electric Made Art, which treats electrification as a medium rather than as a utility that disappears into toasters and overhead lights. The DNA of the RZ 450e and the RX 450h+, the site says, is the material of all four works in the room.

Lisa McQueen, senior manager of Lexus marketing, put the pitch in one question. “Most conversations about electrification focus on how a vehicle is powered. MOTOMORPHOSIS asks a different question: what can electricity power in our imagination?” she said.

The imagination is doing a lot of work, because the sculptures use none of the hardware that makes those two models sell. The production RZ 450e AWD in the 2026 Lexus RZ electric SUV lineup is listed at $50,895, with 308 horsepower and a 264-mile estimated range on 18-inch tires. The production RX 450h+ carries a manufacturer-estimated 38-mile electric-only driving range and an 85 MPGe combined rating, and it can take a 240-volt charge in about two and a half hours. Those figures describe the unaltered twins on the floor. They do not describe the ring or the helix.

THE FOUR OBJECTS IN THE ROOM

Showing the stock vehicles beside the warped ones is the sales floor wearing a gallery pass. Wiesner said the before-and-after is what makes the show readable, a study in reinvention and the will to experiment. Lexus gets the spindle grille in the room, twice, in a week when collectors fill Chelsea for Armory events. MSCHF gets a pair of full-size objects that behave like a smear frame left on pause.

Chelsea Industrial Opens Thursday Night

MOTOMORPHOSIS runs September 24 through 26 at Chelsea Industrial, 545 West 28th Street. The public opening is Thursday, 7 to 9 p.m. The works stay on view Friday and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Entry is listed as free with an RSVP on the project site, which also posts the public opening from 7 to 9 p.m.

SHOW HOURS

• Address: Chelsea Industrial, 545 West 28th Street, New York.
• Thursday, September 24: Public opening from 7 to 9 p.m.
• September 25 and 26: On view from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
• Entry: Free with RSVP through the MOTOMORPHOSIS site.

After Saturday the sculptures have to move again, which Wiesner already flagged as the ugly part of the job. For three days they sit still in Chelsea, two Lexus SUVs that have used up their motion, and two more that can still leave when the lights go out.