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It’s not every day that the art world gets a public break-up, but that’s the case with art collective MSCHF. This week, cofounder and founding chief creative officer Lukas Bentel announced, via a formal press release, he was leaving the group to pursue solo work.
“I am enormously grateful and proud of the MSCHF team and what we created together, it was an enormous collective effort,” Bentel said in a statement. “We moved athletically at MSCHF, but we were designing stories that last. That’s where I want to get back to: making art that stays with people long after the moment has passed.”
Since its founding in 2019, MSCHF has made a name for itself via a series of viral artworks that often take aim at the excesses of the art world. They range from Severed Spots (2020), for which they purchased of a Damien Hirst “Spot” painting for $30,485 which the collective then sold each spot for $450 apiece to ATM Leaderboard, a project for the 2022 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach in which visitors could swipe their card and have their checking balance visible on the screen (ranked). At one point, the top spot was held by someone with $9.5 million in an account.
“Contemporary art feels increasingly irrelevant because it is siloed in the walls of a gallery or museum. We wanted to make work that was in the world, that was consumed as a product and engaged with culture,” Bentel said of the collective.
More recently, MSCHF has garnered art world acceptance, including representation with Perrotin. In 2024, they staged three shows with the gallery at its spaces in Seoul, Los Angeles, and New York. The latter one involved slowly taking parts of a bathroom sink at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and reconstructing it at the gallery for Met’s Sink Of Theseus.
The press release adds that Bentel “conceived, designed, created or directed nearly 300 released works at MSCHF spanning sculpture, footwear, fashion, software, publishing, furniture and vehicles.” Other projects by the group include the creation of a pair of viral Big Red Boots that flooded social media to the saving of a two-year-old cow from being slaughter. Last year, Phaidon published Made by MSCHF, which documented its first six years.
While Bentel pursues “solo art projects as well as commissioned design and commercial work,” it seems like MSCHF is still going forward with some of its Daniel Greenberg, Stephen Tetreault, Gabriel Whaley, and Kevin Wiesner. Its website lists 125 projects with a series of question marks for projects 126–135. But as with any band break-up, the question that remains is, Will the group be the same without one of its founder?