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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
There is an infinite number of ways that Lego toys can be arranged. Artists have taken the popular Danish toy to surprising places, pushing it beyond the boundary of what “toys” are, as we’ve seen here on our blog. But one artist Jan Vormann based in Berlin, Germany has taken Lego to the streets. Some have called it “Lego bombing”, but Vormann prefers to describe his work as “patchwork”, a project that he is bringing around the world.
The little colored bricks that we grew up playing with are more than toys to Berlin based photographer Laird Kay, who uses lego to represent entire cities. His playful photo series titled "Lego City" features miniature skylines and cityscapes inspired by real cities like Dubai, Hong Kong, New York, Toronoto and Vancouver, built to a highly stylized scale from thousands of legos. Kay has gotten to know global cities very well over the past couple of years. As a busy, constantly traveling photographer, he describes himself an architecture geek living in a "plane world", who disagrees about the way we treat old buildings and then toss them out with the garbage when we've finished with them- similar to the way a child destructs his lego buildings to start anew.
New York based artist Mike Lee draws tiny, typical urban places that seem to float in negative space. We previously covered his graphite drawings here, mostly portraying an aerial view of a dollhouse-like world. Lee's latest series, currently on view at Giant Robot's GR gallery in Los Angeles, pushes the peculiarity of his artworks a little bit further. They still contain simplified spaces populated by chubby Lego-like urbanites, but have been spliced up to a more abstract effect.