Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Pabianice, Łódź Voivodeship, Poland
About Zbigniew Libera
- Zbigniew Libera (born July 7, 1959) is a Polish artist.
- Born in Pabianice, Poland, he has become well known for the controversial LEGO Concentration Camp Set that he designed in 1996.
- The LEGO Corporation gave Libera the bricks for free without a clear vision of Libera's project and not knowing he would use them for this purpose.
- This act, however, led Libera to include a controversial notice on his boxes saying "sponsored by LEGO Systems".
- LEGO insists that they did not endorse his artwork. The Jewish Museum in New York City exhibited these sets in 2002 as part of a show entitled Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art.
- Critics charged that Libera's sets trivialize the Holocaust.
- Defenders argue, however, that the LEGO sets mirror the evil-minded ingenuity required to construct the concentration camps as instruments of terror.
- Art historical criticism, like that proposed by Ernst van Alphen, has argued that the toys seek to represent and refigure the Holocaust in a more familiar register that recovers its meaning from overbearing Holocaust education programs.
- Art historian Norman Kleeblatt proposes a similar reading, understanding the works as a study into the Foucauldian biopower of concentration camps.
Read more at Wikipedia