Across galleries and design fairs, artists are reimagining the automobile as a material library, transforming airbags, hubcaps, and body panels into furniture and sculptural objects. Curators cite both sustainability and cultural memory—chrome, lacquer, and safety textiles carry histories of movement and desire—while collectors embrace the hybrid category of functional art. The practice spans limited-edition design and museum-caliber sculpture, with institutions using it to discuss waste, repair, and craft. Over the past decade, these works have moved from studio experiments to centerpieces of themed exhibitions, drawing audiences who might otherwise meet such materials only on the street or in the scrapyard.
A widely acknowledged starting point is Ron Arad’s Rover Chair (1981), which marries a salvaged Rover P6 leather car seat with industrial Kee Klamp tubing. Now in collections including MoMA and the V&A, the piece established a lineage in which automotive salvage could become high design without losing its grit. Its success normalized the presence of dashboards, seat frames, and upholstery in the domestic sphere. Designers and artists continue to cite the chair as proof that post-industrial parts can carry both comfort and critique into living rooms and museum galleries.
That proposition leapt into the gallery mainstream when BRC Designs turned a salvaged BMW 7 Series into a suite of furniture for “Deconstruction” at Industry Gallery in Washington, D.C., in 2011. Seats became loungers, engine parts anchored tables, and wheels reappeared as lighting—an entire interior drawn from one car. The exhibition made process visible, with cuts, welds, and finishes presented as compositional decisions rather than mere fixes. It also gave curators a template for storytelling around provenance, labor, and the ethics of reuse.
Contemporary makers have pushed into softer, safety-oriented components. Dutch artist Reinier Bosch’s Airbag series reconfigures deployed airbags into chairs, benches, and lamps, shown at design fairs such as Design Miami and PAD with Priveekollektie, where curators underscore the tension between accident and care. In lighting, Stuart Haygarth’s chandeliers built from car rear light clusters turn scrapyard optics into theatrical color, reframing mass-produced lenses as prisms. Together, these works make visible the tactile intelligence of automotive textiles and plastics, from ripstop weaves to impact-diffusing foams.
Sculptors have also treated car exteriors as readymade canvases. Richard Prince’s Hoods—painted and pinstriped automobile bonnets shown at Gagosian—flatten muscle-car mythology into wall works that straddle painting and object. Portuguese artist Bordalo II assembles bumpers, headlights, and fenders into large animal reliefs with Underdogs Gallery, while Ptolemy Elrington’s hubcap creatures translate curbside losses into public art commissions, including for the Eden Project. Damián Ortega’s disassembled Volkswagen in Cosmic Thing (2002) remains a touchstone, reminding institutions that a vehicle’s lifecycle can be parsed as sculpture, pedagogy, and ecology at once.
As museums and fairs foreground reuse this year, these practices offer immediate, legible narratives that connect car culture to craft and climate conversations.