A new exhibition at the Vero Beach Museum of Art seeks to strike just the right note between wholesome family fare and edgy, self-referential pop art.
“Nathan Sawaya: The Art of the Brick” features 29 sculptures created entirely from Lego toy bricks. The show is on view in the Schumann Gallery and Stark Rotunda through January 3, 2016.
Most of the sculptures, which include a life-sized human figure posed in the act of tearing its head from its shoulders, to a nearly seven-foot-high arm topped by a clenched hand with pointing finger, depict the human form. The odd men out are a cute dog sculpture near the show’s entrance, and an abstract composition of a sphere balanced atop a conical form.
Like fellow Lego artist Sean Kenney, whose “Nature Connects” exhibition appeared at McKee Botanical Garden earlier this year, Nathan Sawaya is one of 12 artists in the world (and only four in the U.S.) to be designated a Certified Professional by Lego Group, the Danish company that has manufactured the toy since 1947. The title means that Sawaya has Lego’s legal blessing to commercially market the artworks he creates from the eponymous bricks.
Kenney, who initiated the first such partnership with Lego back in 2005, lives in New York; Sawaya has studios in New York and Los Angeles. Both are full time artists whose sole medium is the Lego building block. Both have produced traveling exhibitions of their work, and both are sought after by corporations and private collectors for sculpture commissions. According to the Lego website, Sawaya is as well known for “his high-profile client list” as for his representation of the human form.
Sawaya’s collectors include Donald Trump (who commissioned him to build a model of the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Dubai); Stephen Colbert (who received a life-size portrait figure of himself from the artist), and Lady Gaga (who commissioned a Sawaya sculpture for use in her music video G.U.Y.)
Born in 1973 in Washington (state) and raised in Oregon, Sawaya showed interest in art as child. In college he studied law in New York City and, upon graduating, landed a job with a corporate law firm in the Big Apple.
After hours Sawaya continued to pursue the artistic pleasures of his formative years: drawing, writing stories, and building with his favorite childhood toy: Lego bricks. He became so adept at modeling figures of animals and objects for friends and family that he started a website, brickartist.com, to show off his creations.
He became so confident in his artistic ability that in 2004 he left a six-figure salary in law to pursue life as a Lego artist.
Before striking out on his own, Sawaya honed his building skills during a brief employment with Lego. Lego Group hires those it deems Master Builders not only to design its building sets, but also to create giant sculptures for its Legoland theme parks and company-sponsored events.
According to the Lego website, Nathan Sawaya “is the only person ever to be recognized as both a Lego Master Builder and a Lego Certified Professional.”
There is a lot to see in the current Nathan Sawaya exhibition. The 29 pieces on display fill the Stark Rotunda and Schuman Gallery to overflowing; it is difficult to decide which of the brightly-colored sculptures to focus on first. Sawaya is fond of using basic Lego colors –red, blue, green, yellow—to create an entire figure, although a couple of the sculptures in the show, “X-Ray” (a standing male whose neatly cored-through chest displays a red valentine heart), and “Baseball Player,” are dizzyingly random combination of all of these colors, plus white, orange, and a certain sallow beige.
Among the most compelling sculptures in the exhibition are those figures –featureless, vaguely male mannequins, really– whose plastic corporality dissolves into loose piles of the bricks.
“Hands” depicts a kneeling figure whose arms terminate at the wrists in jagged stumps; two small brick piles rest beneath on the plinth beneath them. The mannequin’s disconsolate posture, as well as its battleship grey color, suggests that this turn of events is not a good thing. Nearby, a similarly agonized torso-length figure (“Yellow”) uses its hands to pull open its chest, thereby releasing a sunshine-colored cascade of bricks from the cavity within.
These sculptures and others like it (in “My Boy” a figure cradles a limp, childlike body in its arms; “Grasp” shows a figure in the clutches of six hands that emerge from the wall behind it) will particularly appeal to visitors in their teens, says museum curator Jay Williams.
“These kind of remind me of things that I’ve seen high school art students do—they are a little surreal,” he says.
“If you look in the average high school art show, they like drama, they like things that are kind of out there a little bit. I think (Sawaya) definitely wants to appeal to a younger audience.”
There is an aspect to the show that will appeal to the art savvy grown-up, too, says Williams, who explains that “Sawaya often refers to the work of other artists.”
“Some of it is historical themes, some have a direct reference to pieces of historical art.”
Williams is here referring to sculptures like Sawaya’s recreation of the Venus de Milo or Michelangelo’s “David” in Lego bricks, or his Lego mosaic pictures after Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” or Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring.”
None of those works are in this show, although Williams includes the mosaic portraits of Alfred Hitchcock and Andy Warhol that are currently on display as references to fine art.
And then there are the show’s two skull-themed artworks that refer to artists’ enduring preoccupation with that symbol of death.
“I think he means them in a lighthearted way. I think it’s that idea of taking cultural icons and using them,” says Williams.
A sculpture of a black human skull on a gray fluted pedestal might put one in mind of contemporary artists Damian Hirst, Gabriel Orozco, or Yang Jiechang, who have used real and synthetic skulls in their art, while a wall-mounted quartet of bas-relief skulls in red, yellow, green, and blue recalls Andy Warhol’s 1976-77 series of screen printed skull paintings. That one is Andy Warhol lite, if you will.
Any suspicions that “Nathan Sawaya: Art of the Brick” aspires to the status of high (and therefore inscrutable) art can be put to rest, according to Williams.
He says that the current Civil War photo show in the museum’s Titelman Gallery, the upcoming folk art exhibition in the Stark Gallery, and “Art of the Brick” have one thing in common: their easy accessibility to a wide audience.
“We’re always accusing art museums of being elitist. And I think with these three shows — none of them are elitist exhibitions. That doesn’t mean that they are not high quality, in each respect. I think we are breaking that stereotype,” he says.
