By Rod Easdown
A Holden salesman once told me Fords are not cars, they’re 20,000 spare parts travelling in close formation. The work of Swiss artist Fabian Oefner reminds me of this statement. His meticulously accurate cars explode into their individual parts. He’s an artist adopted by the M.A.D Gallery, a homage to mechanical art devices.
If you’re a technology nut and you’ve never heard of the M.A.D. Gallery, you have a treat in store. I knew nothing of it until a media release turned up from someone in Geneva plugging a book of truck photography.
Truck photography? Has someone suddenly made trucks beautiful? After looking, I decided not. But the gallery’s website is stunning.
M.A.D. Gallery’s website is chockers with beautiful and compelling technology. It’s big on watches and timepieces (it calls them horological machines) but it also deals with motorcycles, penny-farthings, music boxes, musical instruments and Fabian Oefner’s exploding cars.
The M.A.D. Gallery opened in 2011 in Geneva’s old town – and a second M.A.D. Gallery has since opened in, of all places, Taipei. As well as a permanent display of timepieces, it gathers glorious examples of mechanical art from around the world, “each one making your heart beat that little bit faster”, the website assures.
The gallery is an offshoot of an operation called MB&F, or Maximilian Büsser and friends, which has gathered people to design and build a radical and original “horological masterpiece” every year.
Büsser started out working for watch company Jaeger-LeCoultre and then ran a company specialising in rare timepieces, before forming MB&F in 2005.
Now Büsser is hooked up with artists from around the world, from Japan’s Chicara Nagata, who took three years to build his first motorcycle, to American Bob Potts, who makes kinetic sculptures that capture the beauty of natural movement, such as the flight of birds.
Go to madgallery.ch, but make yourself a cup of coffee first; you’ll be there a while.
