Not so long ago, solving Rubik’s cube used to be a craze, with people of all ages trying to solve it in the shortest possible time. Then, solving the Rubik’s cube simply meant getting a uniform color on each side of the cube. But here’s a Ukrainian Rubik’s cube artist, Alex Ivanchak, who does one better. He creates portraits and other works of art by using a large number of Rubik’s cubes.
What’s most fascinating about Ivanchak’s Rubik’s cube portraits is he doesn’t have a blueprint to guide him. He uses the tile color of each tile of the cube as a pixel and combines these ‘pixels’ to make the picture. With incredible speed, he picks up a cube, sets the right pattern on it, and places it in the wooden frame, one after the other. The end result is a portrait in amazing likeness of the original.
Ivanchak’s love for Rubik’s cube started early and he became an expert at solving it. It was only natural for him to enter into Rubik’s cube competitions. He excelled in all its formats, such as 3x3x3 Cube to 7x7x7 Cube, fewest moves, one-handed, blindfold, and several others. It isn’t surprising that he has been Ukraine’s national record holder 23 times!
People noticed Ivanchak’s incredible talent when he posted a video of Rubik’s cube portrait of JiMin, the South Korean singer-songwriter of the pop group BTS. It was amazing to see him using 400 Rubik’s cubes to create it. This work immediately went viral and left people wondering how he could do this when they can’t even solve a single Rubik’s cube properly! As his fans shared this video, he became famous overnight.
Since then, Ivanchak has created portraits of many famous personalities, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, Mona Lisa, and many others. It certainly wonders how this talented individual, mixes art, mathematics, logic, and geometry to create the correct patterns for his artworks that result in beautiful large portraits.
