The Art of the Brick exhibition, just opened at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, is showcasing numerous large-scale Lego sculptures — including a six-meter-long T-Rex skeleton — by New York-based artist Nathan Sawaya.
The works are displayed over eight galleries, each with a specific theme (artist studio, portrait gallery, the drawing board, the emotion box)
With the bricks as his medium and aided by glue, Sawaya has managed to transform a humble children’s plaything into intriguing art pieces. His most iconic piece “Yellow” shows a man in yellow bricks ripping open his chest to reveal a torrent of Lego bricks tumbling out from his thoracic cavity. While there are plenty of Lego brick tableau (Alfred Hitchcock, Jasper Jones) it is really in the often humorous 3-D sculptures that Sawaya excels, creating very expressive life-sized statues of people that reflect on the human condition: in “Mask,” a man removes his own face while in “Hands,” a man stares as his disintegrated hands – what the artist explains as being his nightmare of losing his most important tool
The Art of the Bricks runs until 14 April 2013 at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore
As First published on ARTINFO.COM