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If you’ve ever wanted to see some of art history’s greatest masterpieces re-imagined in LEGO blocks, now’s your chance: Starting September 28, the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) at Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens will be hosting “The Art of the Brick,” an exhibit that will feature artist Nathan Sawaya’s LEGO recreations of Michelangelo’s David, Degas’s Little Dancer, Whistler's Mother, Munch's The Scream and Van Gogh’s The Starry Night.
Photograph: Courtesy of The Art of the Brick
NYSCI is billing the event as “the world’s largest display of LEGO art” and true to its word, the show will be presenting 100 of Sawaya’s pieces. Besides famous artworks, the show will also include a 20-foot Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton made from more than 80,000 LEGO bricks, as well as Sawaya’s signature work: Yellow, a life-size rendering of a man ripping his chest open as thousands of yellow LEGOs cascade from the breach. As you might expect, Sawaya replicates sculptures in 3-D, but he also gives some of the paintings the same treatment, including the aforementioned Scream and The Kiss by Gustav Klimt.
Sawaya is a former New York City corporate lawyer turned contemporary artist and he lays claim to being the first to bring LEGO bricks into the art world as a medium. His creations have elevated what had previously been thought of as a child’s toy into pieces that cross the line between Surrealism and Pop Art. If you want to check out his work for yourself, “The Art of the Brick” will be on view through January 26.