This is an exploding Lamborghini Miura SV

Quick question: what’s roughly the last thing you want to see happen to a Lamborghini Miura SV? We'd wager it’s probably a tie between ‘end up in the possession of your high-school bully’ and, well, explode. 

But it’s hard not to describe what this very real and very authentic Miura SV has done is explode, and it’s all in the name of art.

Of course, it’s not really been blown apart into little pieces. We’d be a little less calm about things if that were the case. This is the latest in Fabian Oefner’s Disintegrating series, which explore the inner workings of some of the most desirable cars on the planet.

More than the immediately incredible spectacle, Disintegrating deconstructs the discrete moving parts that form the very... well, moving parts of a car, trying to find the soul of the machine. The looks may be what catches your eye, but it’s the machinery that gets its hooks into your heart. 

Oefner debuted the first Disintegrating in 2013, and has been painstakingly arranging, photographing and combining images of intricately detailed scale models since, to quite spectacular effect. 

For Disintegrating X, however, the scale – and stakes – increased. For the first time, Fabian would use the real thing. And not just any real thing, but a Lamborghini Miura SV, just like this one. 

A friend just happened to have a Miura that was going in for restoration – what, your friends don’t? – and offered Oefner the opportunity to set his skills to a full-size car for the first time. 

“It started as an idea to stop time,” says Oefner. We’ve often wanted much the same thing, to be honest – usually around 7am on a Monday morning. Thing is, though, that Oefner’s idea was to create a moment of exceptional action and freeze that forever. Ironic, then, that to do so took two years of meticulous work, to say nothing of the 1,500 separate images that comprise the final work. 

Like his previous works, Disintegrating X is currently on display at the MB&F M.A.D. Gallery in Dubai, with a limited run of prints in two sizes. We’d suggest picking one up. Before your high-school bully does.