Artist Dismantles Audi R8 For Stunning 'Exploded' Image

The 5.2-litre V10 that’s seen service in two different generations of R8 is now 10 years old. Baking a cake doesn’t quite seem like the right way to celebrate, so Audi came up with a very different way of marking the occasion.

The company commissioned artist Fabian Oefner - known in our little corner of the Internet for incredible ‘exploded’ images of cars - to do his thing. The process is detailed in this video, and it looks painstaking.

You may not think so on first viewing, but the image is very real. The back end of an R8 was reduced to its component parts, including the engine - which had a complete teardown. Each bit was individually photographed on a black background, before being meticulously arranged on one canvas in Photoshop to give the appearance of the car exploding. Must have been a lot of layers.

“A lot of people will look at the photograph and say it’s fake, and that’s fine,” Fabian said, adding, “But maybe the five per cent that look a bit longer and a bit closer - they will see somebody’s actually photographed every single piece.

“As a gift from myself to them, [they will] see a beautiful photograph with a beautiful story behind it.”