Lego Lilies? Ai Weiwei recreates Monet’s giant masterpiece

Anybody who has sat and tried to painstakingly full a 1,000 piece jigsaw will seemingly look upon Ai Weiwei’s newest Lego work with awe. Fabricated from 650,000 Lego bricks in 22 colors, the staggering 15m-long work is a recreation of Claude Monet’s triptych Water Lilies (1914-26) from the gathering of the Museum of Fashionable Artwork, New York. The most important Lego work that the dissident Chinese language artist has ever made, Water Lilies #1 (2022) will go on present at London’s Design Museum when it opens Ai Weiwei: Making Sense subsequent month (7 April-30 July).

The unique Impressionist masterpiece—depicting one of many lily ponds at Monet’s residence in Giverny, close to Paris—has change into an internationally well-known picture of nature and lightweight. For his model, Ai has used Lego bricks to “strip away Monet’s brushstrokes in favour of a depersonalised language of business components and hues,” in response to a press assertion. “These pixel-like blocks recommend up to date digital applied sciences that are central to fashionable life, and in reference to how artwork is usually disseminated within the up to date world.”

However what’s that hidden door on the proper aspect of the Lego picture? The darkish portal depicts the underground dugout in Xinjiang province, China, the place Ai and his father, Ai Qing, lived in pressured exile within the Nineteen Sixties. “Their hellish desert residence punctures the watery paradise,” an announcement says. Who knew Lego may have so many dimensions? Who knew a lily pond might be so deep?