The Brickman

The VÜ, Toronto, CA 2011

The 8-meter high sculpture, placed in the heart of the old Toronto, depicts a perspectivally distorted, anthropomorphic figure made of bricks of ever-diminishing size. The perspectival distortion with an extreme vanishing point, makes the figure seem expressive and dynamic and simultaneously larger than it actually is.
Brickman is an abstract “urban figure” that quotes the smokestacks and dynamic of the big city and the grid of the streets surrounding it. It takes up the plunging lines of the rows of high-rises and the vanishing points of the streets that run perfectly straight for miles.
It relates to the masonry buildings of the neighborhood and takes people’s thoughts back to the period of Toronto’s early development.