Fabian Oefner was born in Aarau, Switzerland, in 1984. He lives and works in Connecticut. The pictures look like high-speed disasters: cars exploding, paint becoming a black hole, a Vermeer shattering mid-air. Some of that is photography. Some of it is the opposite. Months of disassembly. Thousands of stills. A fiction of an instant that never happened.
The Disintegrating series takes scale-model Ferraris, GT40s, and Bugattis apart piece by piece and rebuilds the explosion in the studio, photograph by photograph. Black Hole drips acrylic onto a rod spun by a drill until centripetal force writes a galaxy. He has poured iridescent paint, frozen sound in powder, and hung a Riva so it looks like it is still cutting a wake.
He gave a TED talk, Psychedelic Science, in 2013, the year he founded Studio Oefner. Exhibitions include Momentum at the Sharjah Center of the Arts, Un monde en mouvement at the Musée Historique in Lausanne, and Extract at ETH Zurich. The pictures circulate in design and science magazines as if they were evidence. They are closer to theater.
Oefner is the kind of artist the series is built for. The experiment is the artwork, and the camera is there because the event will not sit still.
