Art of the Brick
April 10 – September 6, 2010
When we think of sculptural art, we imagine something made by casting metal or carving stone or perhaps modeling in clay. With Art of the Brick we realize that even a child’s toy may provide the inspiration and material for creating imaginative works of art. The 29 sculptural works in this exhibition were created exclusively using the little colorful, rectangular LEGO® bricks popular with children all around the world.
Nathan Sawaya is the artist who created these works, having found a way to turn his childhood passion for creating familiar and imagined objects with LEGO building bricks into a highly creative and gratifying career. He is one of just nine LEGO Certified Professionals in the world, officially licensed but not employed by the LEGO company to use LEGO products for commercial and artistic purposes, each of whom exemplifies the creative possibilities of the LEGO building systems.
Sawaya is a full-time artist who fine-tuned his craft creating awe-inspiring and large-scale sculptures as a LEGO Master Model Builder for the LEGOLAND theme park in Southern California. His art primarily takes shape in three-dimensional sculptures and oversized mosaic portraits. Art of the Brick is the first exhibition of its kind ever to focus exclusively on the LEGO brick as an art medium.
Like nearly every American under the age of 50, Sawaya’s fascination with LEGO toys dates from his childhood. His parents encouraged his creative explorations, allowing him to build an entire city in their family room, and leave it in place for more than a decade. But the boy grew up, earned a law degree and started a career as a corporate lawyer.
Viewers can relate to Sawaya’s materials, but are amazed by what happens to it in his hands. His work is obsessively and painstakingly crafted; it is both beautiful and playful.He is committed to scale and color perfection. A watershed moment was determining how to create curves out of the little rectangular forms; from a distance the sharp corners of Sawaya's sculptures disappear and the eye is tricked into seeing smooth fluid lines. Sawaya maintains an inventory of more than 1.5 million bricks in his New York City studio. He buys them by the tens of thousands and arranges them by color; walking into the studio is like stepping into a rainbow. His largest work so far was a 15 x 53 foot billboard on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles made of 500,000 bricks.
Sawaya goes far beyond replicating actual objects in his sculptures, he embues them with thoughtful meaning and observations. His series of human figures known by their color, such as Yellow or Green, have become his signature pieces. These explore our relationships with the world, whether we are taking the brave step to open ourselves up and “spill” our guts to another or we are taking environmental matters into our hands rather than idly talk about them.
As Sawaya so deftly demonstrates, people are limited in what they can make out of these simple geometric shapes only by their imagination. It is impossible to know how many engineers and scientists were early LEGO builders. Visitors to The Art of the Brick will never look at LEGO bricks in the same way again. They will probably be inspired to search out the LEGO bricks in their closets and try their hands and imagination at creating sculptures.
