P-00655-No-279-285-Stack_rt_1
Ai Weiwei: Making Sense
WATER LILIES #1,2022
Lego bricks
Courtesy of Galleria Continua
The largest Lego work Ai has ever created, this is a recreation of one of the most famous paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet. We think of the painting as a portrait of nature, but Monet's lily pond at Giverny was a construct--an idealised landscape that he himself designed. To the right of Ai's version is a dark portal, which is the door to the underground dugout in Xinjiang province where Ai and his father, Ai Qing, lived in forced exile in the 1960s.
Their hellish desert home punctures the watery paradise. The image has been constructed out of Lego bricks to strip away Monet's brushstrokes in favour of a depersonalised language of industrial parts and colours.
All text above is Copyright The Design Museum © April 2023
P-00655-No-279-285-Stack_rt_1
Ai Weiwei: Making Sense
WATER LILIES #1,2022
Lego bricks
Courtesy of Galleria Continua
The largest Lego work Ai has ever created, this is a recreation of one of the most famous paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet. We think of the painting as a portrait of nature, but Monet's lily pond at Giverny was a construct--an idealised landscape that he himself designed. To the right of Ai's version is a dark portal, which is the door to the underground dugout in Xinjiang province where Ai and his father, Ai Qing, lived in forced exile in the 1960s.
Their hellish desert home punctures the watery paradise. The image has been constructed out of Lego bricks to strip away Monet's brushstrokes in favour of a depersonalised language of industrial parts and colours.
All text above is Copyright The Design Museum © April 2023