Ai Weiwei uses 650,000 Lego bricks for recreation of Monet’s painting

A 15-meter Lego version of Water Lilies was created for an exhibition at the Design Museum in London.

It’s not the first time we’ve heard the Lego brand associated with a piece of fine art, as we’ve bought cube sets that can be used to display works by Adny Warhol, van Gogh, or even Hokusai in an afternoon. Ai Weiwei, however, has embarked on a much grander performance: he built Claude Monet’s Water Lilies #1 out of 650,000 Lego pieces. The original impressionist work is part of a triptych currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Lego version will be on display from 7 April as part of the exhibition Ai Weiwei: Making Sence, which opens at the Design Museum in London.

Ai Weiwei used plastic cubes in 22 colors for his own version, and the pixelated effect achieved is a clear reference to the advance of digital culture and AI in art. Lego will not be the only piece in the exhibition: the installation Untitled (Lego Incident) was built using Lego bricks donated by the community. The donations started coming in after the Danish toy company rejected Ai Weiwei’s large order of cubes, as they were to be used for a work on political dissidents for an Australian exhibition. The artist has been using Legos for the artwork since 2014, when he used the plastic cubes to create portraits of political prisoners.

Click here for tickets and further information.

Source: ArtNews
Cover photo: Design Museum/© Ela Bialkowska OKNO Studio

• design
• exhibition
• lego
• ai weiwei
• london
• 17. velencei építészeti biennále