IT’S a sight more than enough to make the toughest car guy cringe; a red 1972 Lamborghini Miura “exploding,” its body intact but its sundry mechanical bits completely disassembled and flying off in every possible direction. The image is eerie as it is powerful, at once beautiful and unsettling. It’s true: It’s hard to look away from a train wreck.

Responsible for this deft deconstruction of the iconic car is Swiss photographer Fabian Oefner, who had actually created the image by combining over 1,500 pictures chosen from around a thousand more he had shot over a period of two years. The image is dubbed “Disintegrating X,” and it is being presented by Maximilian Büsser & Friends’ (MB&F) M.A.D. Gallery.

Busser, by the way, set up in 2011 the first M.A.D. (or Mechanical Art Devices) Gallery in Geneva, Switzerland, to serve as a venue in which to display his “kinetic art” timepieces, or Horological Machines. After Geneva, the art space is now also found in Dubai, Hong Kong and Taipei.

“Disintegrating X,” meanwhile, is the latest in Oefner’s series of prints, coming after “Disintegrating” and “Disintegrating II.”

The first in the series, exhibited in 2013, is composed of prints of an exploding 1961 Jaguar E-Type, 1954 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR and a 1967 Ferrari 330 P4. The follow-up images of 2018 featured five cars — Porsche 956, Audi Auto Union Type C, Maserati 250F, Ford GT40 and Bugatti 57 SC. In both series of prints Oefner digitally assembled around 2,000 photographs to create the images, much like as he subsequently did in “Disintegration X” with the Miura.

All right, this last series may seem like a letdown then, considering the multiple — and rarer — cars which appeared in the first two batches. The process involved in creating the prints in all Disintegration installments was basically the same, too. And, as awesome as a Miura SV is. . . well, it’s no 330 P4 or 57 SC.

However, it would be a big mistake to dismiss the latest work as a poor parody of the first two series of prints. This is because the cars (and their sundry parts) which Oefner took photos of in “Disintegration” and “Disintegration II” are mere scale models — not actual cars. In contrast, the “disintegrating” Miura SV is the real thing.

Apparently, the idea to shift from shooting scale models to an actual car simply presented itself. Oefner relates an acquaintance was restoring his personal Miura, and offered him the chance to shoot the car while its various bits were being reassembled. The goal, of course, was to create the latest “Disintegration” print.

As the photographer put it in an interview published by Lamborghini magazine, he didn’t need to be asked twice to work on one of his favorite cars.

“To get to touch every single screw and piece of that legend, and put them into a final composition. . . that’s a dream come true. It had always been my dream to create an art piece with a real car,” Oefner told the magazine.     

The process called for Oefner and his team to travel to the workshops around the Lamborghini factory in Sant’Agata, Italy, so they could shoot each piece of the Miura as it was being put back together. And Oefner admitted the leap between photographing scale models and a real car and its parts did pose some challenges.

“It was quite different, yes. I worked on the scale models in my studio, which is very quiet, and creating was almost a soothing process. With the real car it got a lot more complicated. I was in the workshop where you’d have constant noise. Beside me, I had people working — and that was the most beautiful experience of this whole endeavor — whom I had to constantly ask; ‘Can I please have a little corner?’,” he said.

The photographer noted they were shooting during the summer, too, during which time the temperature inside the workshops hovered around 44 degrees Celsius.

“It smelled like gasoline in the air. It was way more tangible when you work with the real thing. Now, when I look at the photograph, all the smells and the ambiance of the workshop come back,” Oefner shared.

Fittingly, what emerged from the collection of more than 1,500 photos was a composite image more compelling than any of the previous prints. Because in “Disintegration X,” the exploding Miura is not an illusion, but rather a dissection of the truth.

Oefner’s Miura SV image is available in two sizes: 140cm x 70cm limited to 18 prints and two artist editions; and 230cm x 115cm limited to eight prints and two artist editions.