Paulina Aubey’s LEGO portraits ingeniously merge popular form with popular content in order to question our relationship to celebrity. Having begun her artistic career working with pastels, Aubey’s passion for pop culture inspired her to try her hand with a more popular medium: LEGO bricks. She has elevated this unusual medium to the status of fine art, creating expressive portrayals of contemporary icons and the idols of her 1980s childhood. Her portraits of religious figures, movie characters, and pop stars—including David Bowie and Marilyn Monroe—blur the distinction between figurative and abstract art. They appear highly detailed from a distance and become pixelated upon closer inspection; this viewing experience prompts audiences to reflect on how much we can ever truly understand our idols. In order to create her portraits, Aubey chooses a digital image of her subject and manipulates it to create the desired expression and color scheme before selecting appropriate blocks of LEGO to build the work.