Vik Muniz (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈvik
muˈnis]; born in 1961, São Paulo, Brazil)[1] is a Brazilian artist and
photographer. Initially a sculptor, Muniz grew interested with the photographic
representations of his work, eventually focusing completely on photography. Primarily
working in series, Muniz incorporates the use of quotidian objects such as
diamonds, sugar, thread, chocolate syrup and garbage in his practice to create
bold, ironic and often deceiving imagery, gleaned from the pages of pop culture
and art history. His work has been met with both commercial success and
critical acclaim, and has been exhibited worldwide. His solo show at MAM in Rio
de Janeiro was second only to Picasso in attendance records.
"The moment we write down an
idea, we kill it – we take it out of the garden, and place it in a vase. I keep
cultivating my ideas like in a garden: some of them die, some others I water so
they remain beautiful. Some others cross my mind accidentally."
"I’m the Hugo Chaves of art
world; I want to make something populist, to make something that anybody has
access to"
Muniz is best known for
recreating famous imagery from art history and pop culture with unexpected,
everyday objects, and photographing them.[6][7] For example, Muniz's Action Photo, After Hans Namuth (From
Pictures of Chocolate), a Cibachrome print,
is a Bosco Chocolate
Syrup recreation of one of Hans Namuth's photographs
of Jackson Pollock
in his studio.[4]
Muniz has spoken of wanting to
make "color pictures that talked about color and also talked about the practical
simplification of such impossible concepts". He has spoken of an interest
in making pictures that "reveal their process and material
structure", and describes himself as having been "a willing bystander
in the middle of the shootout between structuralist and post-structuralist
critique". He cites the mosaics
in a church in Ravenna as one of his influences.[8]
Muniz says that when he takes
photographs, he intuitively searches for "a vantage point that would make
the picture identical to the ones in my head before I’d made the works",
so that his photographs match those mental images.[9] He sees photography as having
"freed painting from its responsibility to depict the world as fact"
Muniz works in a range of media, from trash to peanut butter and jelly,
the latter used to recreate Andy Warhol’s famous Double Mona Lisa
(1963) that was in turn an appropriation of Da
Vinci’s original. Layered appropriation is a
consistent theme in Muniz’s work: in 2008, he undertook a large-scale project
in Brazil, photographing trash-pickers as figures from emblematic paintings,
such as Jacques-Louis David’s Neoclassical
Death of Marat, and then recreating the
photographs in large-scale arrangements of trash. The project was documented in
the 2010 film Waste Land in an attempt to raise awareness for urban
poverty. Muniz explained the work as a “step away from the realm of fine art,”
wanting instead to “change the lives of people with the same materials they
deal with every day.”
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