Vik Muniz (Brazilian-American, born 1961) is distinguished as one of the most innovative and creative artists of our time. Endlessly playful and inventive in his approach, Muniz harnesses a remarkable virtuosity in creating his renowned “photographic delusions.”
Past Exhibition
Vik Muniz
February 28 – August 21, 2016
Medusa Marinara, from the After Warhol series, 1997
Vik Muniz
Dye destruction print
Courtesy of the artist
Art © Vik Muniz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYIn this work, Muniz formed twists of spaghetti and swirls of deep red marinara sauce into the terrifying visage of Medusa, the mythological Gorgon whose gaze could turn a viewer to stone. The photograph, printed in the shape of the plate, playfully pays homage to Italian Baroque master Caravaggio’s monstrous painting of the same subject, which shares the round format.
Action Photo (after Hans Namuth), from the Pictures of Chocolate series, 1998
Vik Muniz
Dye destruction print
Galerie Xippas, Paris
Art © Vik Muniz and the Estate of Hans Namuth/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYPopular culture, and its resonance within our collective memory, has been of consistent interest to Muniz throughout his career. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he began exploring issues of celebrity and portraiture in his work, often using iconic and instantly recognizable source imagery. Here, he used chocolate syrup to recreate Hans Namuth’s famous photograph of Jackson Pollock at work. The viscous consistency of Muniz’s material echoes the structure of Pollock’s famous drip paintings, creating a playful integration of form and content.
Double Mona Lisa (Peanut Butter and Jelly), from the After Warhol series, 1999
Vik Muniz
Chromogenic print
Galerie Xippas, Paris
Art © Vik Muniz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYIn this work, Muniz cast the Mona Lisa in peanut butter and jelly in a witty reference to her exceptionally recognizable face.
Khyber Pass, Self-Portrait as an Oriental, After Rembrandt, from the Pictures of Junk series, 2005
Vik Muniz
Chromogenic print
High Museum of Art, Purchase with funds from the H. B. and Doris Massey Charitable Trust, 2005.288
Art © Vik Muniz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYMuniz begins most series with a self portrait, as a way of testing out new ideas before delving into different subject matter. For this work, from his Pictures of Junk series, he assembled a distorted version of the image on the floor and photographed it from an angle to correct the perspective. This technique causes the objects on each end of the photograph to seem out of proportion from each other.
Marat (Sebastião), from the Pictures of Garbage series, 2008, printed 2011
Vik Muniz
Chromogenic print
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
Art © Vik Muniz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYMuniz’s Pictures of Garbage series exhibits his dedication to social justice, as documented in the 2010 documentary film Waste Land. He worked closely with a group of impoverished trash pickers, or catadores, at a Brazilian garbage dump to create vast assemblages modeled after famous historical artworks. The catadores helped in selecting and arranging objects and served as models. Muniz then sold works in the series to benefit the catadores.The reference for this photograph is Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 painting The Death of Marat, which depicts the moment after the murder of Jean-Paul Marat, a radical leader of the French Revolution. Through his powerful painting, David transformed Marat into a political martyr. In Muniz’s rendering, Tião Santos, head of the catadores union, takes on that role.
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère after Édouard Manet, from the Pictures of Magazines 2 series, 2012
Vik Muniz
Chromogenic print
Ben Brown Fine Arts, London
Art © Vik Muniz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYOut of the refuse of modern life—torn scraps of outdated magazines, destined for obscurity—Muniz has assembled an ode to one of the first paintings of modern life. Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, painted in 1882, explores the treachery of nineteenth-century Parisian nightlife through the depiction of a bartender attending to a male patron reflected in the mirror behind her. Muniz plays on Manet’s style, replacing Manet’s visible brushstrokes with the frayed edges of torn paper and lending the work immense visual interest.
Leda and the Swan, after Leonardo da Vinci, from the Pictures of Junk series, 2009
Vik Muniz
Chromogenic print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase through funds provided by patrons of the Second Annual Collectors Evening, 2011, 2011.6
Art © Vik Muniz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYMuniz has achieved a sort of alchemy in his Pictures of Junk series by transforming refuse—a substance we try to hide or ignore—into something beautiful and compelling. Seen here from some forty feet above the floor, objects such as discarded hubcaps, pipes, appliances, and tires become the building blocks for an imaginative but ephemeral re-creation of Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated Renaissance painting Leda and the Swan. Leonardo’s painting is in fact known only through copies, the original long lost. Muniz, with his characteristic sharp wit, has thus created a copy of a copy.
Picking Flowers in a Field, after Mary Cassatt, from the Pictures of Magazines 2 series, 2012
Vik Muniz
Chromogenic print
Ben Brown Fine Arts, London
Art © Vik Muniz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYFrom a distance, this work appears to be a detailed copy of an 1875 Mary Cassatt painting. Up close, however, viewers can see the individual scraps of torn magazines used to construct the work. Muniz is deeply interested in this transformational moment: when the overall illusion of a work is subsumed by the fragments that compose it.
Sandcastle #10, from the Sandcastles series, 2014
Vik Muniz
Chromogenic print
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
Art © Vik Muniz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYMuniz frequently riffs on ideas of scale by making extremely large subjects appear small and representing particles invisible to the naked eye at enormous sizes. In blurring the line between these seemingly simple divisions, Muniz poses questions about the nature of perception. In this work, he achieved a simultaneously epic and whimsical feat by carving the image of a castle into a single grain of sand. The resulting photograph was made through a high-powered microscope. Watch this video, made by The Creators Project, to learn about the innovative process Muniz used.
Jerusalem, from the Postcards from Nowhere series, 2015
Vik Muniz
Chromogenic print
Courtesy of the artist
Art © Vik Muniz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYMuniz used familiar tourist imagery to reflect on the impulse to commemorate life’s experiences in his series Postcards from Nowhere. He collected thousands of postcards and assembled them into nostalgic imagery representing well-known vistas. In this case, we see a view of Jerusalem prominently featuring the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock. The works in the series also reflect Muniz’s contemplation on the transition between analog and digital imagery, as we use material images like postcards less and less frequently.
Liver (Hepatocytes) Cell Pattern 1, from the Colonies series, 2014
Vik Muniz
Chromogenic print
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
Art © Vik Muniz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYIn this work from his Colonies series, Muniz trained cancer cells to grow in a decorative pattern, bringing order to a destructive force of nature. Muniz donated proceeds from the sale of the works to advance cancer research.
Vik, 2 Years Old, from the Album series, 2014
Vik Muniz
Chromogenic print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase through funds provided by patrons of the Sixth Annual Collectors Evening, 2016 Art © Vik Muniz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYIn Muniz’s recent series Album, he took the time-honored tradition of the family snapshot as his subject. Muniz fastidiously builds replicas of archetypal moments by collecting thousands of discarded snapshots, cutting them up into small pieces, and pasting them together as a collage. This work, a self portrait based on a photograph of the artist at age 2, is the first successful work from that series. With an eye to emphasizing the layered texture of the collage, Muniz pioneered a special approach to lighting and scanning the original before printing it at monumental scale.
Overview
Vik Muniz is an innovative artist who creates imagery within a nexus of diverse media. Working with a dizzying array of unconventional materials—including sugar, tomato sauce, diamonds, magazine clippings, chocolate syrup, dust, and junk—Muniz painstakingly builds tableaux before recording them with his camera. From a distance, the subject of each resulting photograph is discernible; up close, the work reveals a complex and surprising matrix through which it was assembled. That revelatory moment when one thing transforms into another is of deep interest to the artist.
Muniz’s work often quotes iconic images from popular culture and art history, drawing on our sense of collective memory while defying easy classification and mischievously engaging a viewer’s process of perception. His more recent work incorporates electron microscopes and manipulates microorganisms to explore issues of scale and to unveil both the familiar and the strange in spaces that are typically inaccessible to the human eye.
This major mid-career retrospective canvasses more than twenty-five years of Muniz’s work to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, reminding us of the power of art to surprise, delight, and transform our perceptions of the world.
The Original Copy
Great artists of every age have copied the work of their predecessors and, in the act of appropriation, have created remarkably fresh originals with distinct identities. Muniz has continued this tradition of copying as a legitimate creative act, learning from his close study of centuries of artistic practice. In this gallery, he playfully and skillfully re-creates work by some of art history’s greatest painters, harnessing a diverse set of materials to interpret compositions by Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Monet, and Andy Warhol.
Muniz’s use of garbage and junk as building materials for his compositions is particularly celebrated. To make his Pictures of Junk and Pictures of Garbage series, he placed his camera on a platform raised by a crane high above a warehouse floor. Using the open space below as a canvas, he arranged debris into sculptural compositions that re-created mythological scenes and famous paintings when seen from the camera’s elevated vantage point. The resulting photographs remain the only permanent record of these astounding creations.