Rolls-Royce Black Badge Cullinan by Cyril Kongo
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars
Cyril Kongo has built an unlikely but compelling bridge between street art and the luxury automotive industry, transforming some of the world’s most exclusive vehicles into collectible works of art.
Best known for his roots in Paris’ underground graffiti scene of the 1980s, Kongo has since collaborated with marquee automotive brands including Porsche, bringing his signature bursts of color, layered typography and urban energy to bespoke commissions.
His work reflects a broader shift within the luxury car market, where personalization and artistic storytelling have become as valuable as engineering pedigree. By merging contemporary art with precision craftsmanship, Kongo has helped redefine the automobile not simply as a mode of transportation, but as a cultural statement piece: enter the Rolls-Royce Black Badge Cullinan by Cyril Kongo.
Rolls-Royce Black Badge Cullinan By Cyril Kongo
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars has long treated the automobile as an art form, but its latest collaboration with French graffiti pioneer Cyril Kongo pushes that philosophy into entirely new territory.
The marque has unveiled five bespoke Black Badge Cullinan commissions featuring interiors individually hand-painted by Kongo, whose vivid visual language has become synonymous with the intersection of luxury, street culture and contemporary art. Curated through Rolls-Royce Private Offices in Seoul, New York, and Goodwood, the collection represents one of the most immersive artist collaborations in the brand’s modern history.
These invitation-only Private Offices serve as extensions of the Home of Rolls-Royce, offering ultra-high-net-worth clients a more intimate, highly personalized commissioning experience.
Rolls-Royce Black Badge Cullinan by Cyril Kongo
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars
Known for transforming urban graffiti into collectible fine art, Kongo approached the Black Badge Cullinan as a moving canvas. The result is what he calls “The Kongoverse,” a highly expressive interior environment layered with cosmic imagery, abstract typography and bursts of saturated color.
Each SUV shares a dramatic black interior foundation accented with contrasting tones, including Phoenix Red, Mandarin, Forge Yellow and Turchese, though every vehicle carries its own one-of-one artwork. The pieces extend across the fascia, the rear waterfall console, the picnic tables, and the center console, creating a continuous composition throughout the cabin.
At the center of each commission is a hand-painted Starlight Headliner, one of the most technically ambitious features ever attempted by Rolls-Royce Bespoke. Inspired by astronomy and quantum physics, Kongo incorporated imagined planets, symbolic equations, and references to infinity into the ceiling artwork before collaborating with engineers to map the placement of all 1,344 illuminated fiber-optic “stars.” The ceilings feature custom color combinations and eight shooting stars, including one that stretches the entire length of the cabin—a first for Rolls-Royce.
Rolls-Royce Black Badge Cullinan by Cyril Kongo
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars
“When I first saw Black Badge Cullinan, I felt compelled to create my own interpretation of the universe it belonged to – what I call ‘The Kongoverse’. It is a place of fantasy, mathematical formulas, symbols, pyramids, atoms and imagined planets. Rolls-Royce welcomed these ideas and gave them form – that’s what made it special. It was a conversation, using my visual language and Rolls-Royce’s way of making, with the motor car itself as the canvas. To bring that to life in collaboration with the brand’s artisans has been an extraordinary experience,” says Kongo.
The exterior design is equally expressive. Every Black Badge Cullinan by Cyril Kongo is finished in Blue Crystal over Black and features a gradient coachline—another first for the marque. On the driver’s side, Phoenix Red fades into Forge Yellow, while Mandarin transitions into Turchese on the passenger side, each incorporating Kongo’s signature “tag” motif as a Bespoke graphic element.
Rolls-Royce also introduced individually colored brake calipers behind the 23-inch Part Polished Black Badge wheels, with each wheel carrying a different hue drawn from the interior palette. The Phoenix Red tag graphic continues throughout the vehicle, appearing on the illuminated treadplates and even on the black Bespoke umbrellas concealed inside the doors.
Rolls-Royce Black Badge Cullinan by Cyril Kongo
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars
What separates this project from traditional luxury automotive collaborations is the degree to which Kongo was embedded in the Rolls-Royce design process. Months before production began, the artist relocated to the Home of Rolls-Royce in Goodwood, where he worked alongside designers, paint specialists and craftspeople inside the marque’s Bespoke division.
Dedicated studio spaces were created within the facility so Kongo could paint interior components by hand with airbrushes, brushes, and sponges. Rolls-Royce artisans later sealed each piece beneath ten layers of lacquer before sanding and polishing the surfaces to the mirror-like finish expected of the brand.
Rolls-Royce Black Badge Cullinan by Cyril Kongo starlit headliner
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars
The collaboration also underscores a broader shift within the luxury automotive market, where ultra-high-net-worth buyers increasingly seek personalization that extends beyond materials and performance into cultural storytelling. For Rolls-Royce, Black Badge has become the ideal platform for those experiments—a darker, more rebellious counterpart to the marque’s traditional identity.
Through Kongo’s intervention, the Cullinan evolves from luxury SUV into collectible contemporary artwork, blurring the boundaries between automotive craftsmanship, design and fine art.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com
