Assembling Lego art, one brick at a time
Those who saw this year’s Oscar telecast may recall the performance of Everything Is Awesome, the boisterous, nominated theme song from The Lego Movie. As Tegan and Sara sang ( along with rapping members of the Lonely Island comedy group), a phalanx of cowboy- costumed performers fanned out into the audience, handing out 20 fake Academy Award statuettes — each one made entirely of 500 Lego bricks — to such celebrities as Oprah Winfrey and Steve Carell.
It’s not likely that many people would have known the name of the guy who designed and built those faux Oscars. But Nathan Sawaya, who works exclusively in little plastic bricks, commands thousands of dollars for his pieces. The successful contemporary artist also is one of the subjects in A Lego Brickumentary, a documentary celebrating the oddball creative community that has grown around Legos.
A former corporate lawyer, the 42- year- old Sawaya quit his day job in 2004, to pursue what was then a hobby. Today, Sawaya divides his time between studios in New York and Los Angeles. Collectors of his work, which includes original sculptures, portrait commissions and reproductions of world masterpieces, all rendered in plastic bricks, include former president Bill Clinton and skateboarder Tony Hawk.
Although the artist was coy when asked in a recent interview about his finances, the Upstart Business Journal reported Sawaya’s annual earnings at six figures in 2008. It’s hard to imagine that this figure isn’t even higher now. According to Sawaya, his yearly budget for art supplies — which he buys by the tens of thousands every month, directly from Lego — is in the six- figure range. “I have a very good business relationship with the Lego group,” he said.
Sawaya speaks with similar understatement when recalling the roots of his obsession with the Danish building toy — a system of interlocking bricks, the history of which is charted by Brickumentary directors Daniel Junge and Kief Davidson.
“Sure, I had Lego as a kid,” Sawaya said, noting that he once built a 36- square- foot Lego city in his living room. “My parents were a bit accommodating in that way.”
They were less accommodating of his request for a pet. As Sawaya remembers it, after his parents refused to buy him a dog, he decided to build himself a life- size canine out of Legos, his first Lego sculpture.
As a lawyer, Sawaya used art to unwind, inspired by the conceptual sculpture of Tom Friedman, whose materials have included sugar cubes and disposable plastic cups. One of Sawaya’s early series featured sculptures made entirely of candy.
Sawaya may be the best- known artist in this unorthodox medium. But Sawaya is by no means the only artist to work with Legos. The wellknown Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei, for instance, created portraits of political prisoners out of Lego bricks for a 2014 exhibition at the former Alcatraz prison.
You’ll find little of that political edge in Sawaya’s work, which aims not to disturb but to delight. Now in the midst of a world tour, Sawaya’s exhibition The Art of the Brick debuted in 2013 to a warm review in the New York Times, which called the playfulness of his forms “contagious.”
Along with a pixelated version of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring and Rodin’s Thinker, the show featured a massive Tyrannosaurus rex as well as several sculptures that included loose bricks for audience members to play with.