Nathan Sawaya was a corporate attorney in the late 1990s in New York City. But he was in a funk and began hunting for a creative outlet beyond drawing and painting.
So he went back to his childhood and began building Lego sculptures. He posted his creations online and began developing a following. In 2004, he took a gallant leap: he quit his cushy Wall Street attorney job and became a full-time Lego artist.
In 2007, Sawaya held his first art exhibition and has been hosting events all over the world ever since. Atlanta is home to his first immersive multisensory art exhibit. The “Art of the Brick Immersive Experience” at Doraville’s Exhibition Hub Atlanta Art Center ruminates on deep human emotion, death and nature. It opened April 19 and should run at least through the summer with adult tickets starting at $33.90.
In all, there are 70 works of art, some as big as 25 feet long. The exhibition uses more than 1 million Lego bricks.
“It’s about taking art to a different place using Lego as a palette, a canvas to do something brand new,” Sawaya told The Atlanta Journal Constitution during a tour of the exhibit.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
The production company behind the successful Van Gogh immersive exhibition that sold more than 425,000 tickets at Pullman Yards in 2021 helped create Sawaya’s show, incorporating original music, lights and digital technology.
There’s a room featuring multiple takes on his signature sculpture he created years ago in which a person appears to be opening up his own chest and thousands of Lego pieces spill out. “More people talk to me about this piece than any other piece I’ve done,” Sawaya said. “I get a lot of different interpretations. It’s about giving up your soul, your soul spilling out. Kids see guts.”
The exhibit has plenty of Instagrammable moments. “This is a real experiment for me,” he said. “There is a lot of color and playing with color.”
One room features individuals in moments of repose, isolation, rage or passion, set up like a traditional art exhibit, he noted. “I did a lot of these works during the pandemic,” he said.
Another exhibit called “Kinetic Skulls” shows 256 lit Lego skulls moving around in a choreographed dance to haunting music.
“You can sit here and see these waves,” Sawaya said. “It represents obstacles and ups and downs in life. Hopefully, it’s therapeutic to just sit and watch and not think about other things.”
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Another room focuses on three of his bigger sculptures, including a swimmer made of 110,000 bricks along with an eight-minute multisensory show which ends with the digital wall rebuilding the actual sculptures in the room brick by brick.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
The largest room highlights 19 endangered species in Lego form. “I want to raise awareness of these animals,” he said. Among them: a Beluga whale, a Rothschild’s giraffe, a Malayan tiger and a super rare Vaquita dolphin.
The sculptures are enhanced by an 18-minute audio/visual show with digital versions of the animals in their native environments. He wants visitors to relax and take it all in.
“Thus,” he said, pointing at the seating, “the bean bags chairs!’
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Sawaya splits time creating works of art for his own exhibits and commissioned Lego sculptures for folks willing to pay for his creative expertise. “I’ll get these folks who know celebrities and want something unique,” he said. Which celebrities? He can’t say. “I sign a lot of NDAs.”
DC Comics once asked him to build a life-sized Lego Batmobile that was a half-million bricks and took two months to complete. And when Warner Bros. was celebrating a “Friends” reunion, he recreated the entire “Central “Perk” café set out of Legos, including the signature couch.
Sawaya works out of two 3,500-square-foot art studios, one in Los Angeles and one in Las Vegas. He keeps an inventory of 10 million Lego bricks, sorted by shape and color, and orders a whopping 250,000 new Lego bricks a month in four or five palettes directly from Lego in Billund, Denmark.
“It’s by far my greatest capital expense,” he said.
But the work is rewarding, Sawaya said: “I go into trances at points. I’m focused. It’s therapeutic.”
Sawaya is also a consulting producer for the Fox reality competition show “Lego Masters” hosted by comic actor Will Arnett. The fourth season just concluded shooting at a TV and film studio in Hiram. The show’s judges Amy Corbett and Jamie Berard, who work at Lego, came by for an opening night party to check out the exhibition.
Credit: RODNEY HO/rho@ajc.com
Credit: RODNEY HO/rho@ajc.com
“I love the larger than life room with the bricks swirling around,” said Corbett, a senior design manager at Lego. “We sat through it all. This is taking Lego bricks to another level.”
“It’s awe inspiring,” added Berard, design manager for both the Creator Expert and Architecture Lego sets. “He’s outdone himself exponentially. I’ve always appreciated the way he shows the flowing beauty of the human body, the way he puts the bodies in these poses and tells a deeper story.”
IF YOU GO
“Art of the Brick”
10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday-Friday; 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. $33.90-$36.90 with discounts for children, seniors and groups. Exhibition Hub Atlanta Art Center, 5660 Buford Highway NE, Doraville. feverup.com.
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