14 DAY TRIAL // His works have been seen and admired by millions, for Nathan Sawaya is a 36-year-old former attorney who, one day, decided he wanted to render emotion and play with the human form with Lego bricks. He’s sold countless such sculptures and has gotten plenty attention from the media, but it’s just now that Sawaya is able to open his first gallery exclusively with plastic pieces, the New York Post writes.
Sawaya explains that he got his first box of Legos when he was just 5. As he was growing up, he also tried his hand at drawing, painting and sculpting, but he wanted to do something different from the rest of the world. This way, he came up with the idea of making art pieces of Lego bricks and he’s happy to see that people are open to his work. However, what brings him the most pleasure is hearing from families who tell him they were inspired to get out their old Legos after seeing his works.
“I’m a little narcissistic, so I did a self-portrait. I was doing oversized apples that were a couple of feet across, a giant baseball bat, a pencil that was 8 feet tall. And it got such a strong reaction from friends and family, like, ‘You should do more.’ So I did a bunch of different sculptures, threw them up on my Web site, and soon I was getting commissions. I realized there’s something to this. Everyone has a connection to Lego at some point. They’ve played with it or their kids have played with it. And so the audience can relate to it in a different way than other types of work,” Sawaya tells the NY Post about what drove him to this unique form of expressing himself.
From making apples and pencils, he soon moved on to rendering emotion and paying homage to the human form. The latest exhibition is precisely about that, which is why one would be correct to assume that these pieces take up the most time and effort. “When you look at the artwork, you see that it’s made out of just the regular rectangular bricks. But I’m able to create curves and human forms using just the small rectangles. If you’re up close to this figure, you see sharp angles and distinct lines. But you back away, and those lines are blurred into curves. It’s all about perspective,” the artist explains.
Though he’s been commissioned by the likes of Donald Trump and Pete Wentz, Sawaya says he’s not in it for the money, spending a lot of money on making works for which he doesn’t get paid. He likes, for instance, to make human figures that he later places around town, hugging trees or climbing poles. No one pays him for those, especially since they disappear in a matter of hours – but he enjoys making them, saying they’re like “graffiti Lego.”