Vik Muniz

Muniz during the WEF 2013

Vik Muniz (* 1961 in São Paulo ) is a global Brazilian artist and exhibition curator. He lives and works in New York and Rio de Janeiro .

biography

Vik Muniz grew up in Brazil, where he took various courses in fine arts without formally completing a university. In the early 1980s, he began a career in the advertising industry. In the process, his interest in the power of images and their power to manipulate developed. In 1984 Vik Muniz moved to the United States. In 1986 he settled in New York.

Muniz owned the photo book The Best of Life with a selection of photos that had appeared in American Life magazine between 1936 and 1972 . He began to draw his favorite pictures from the photo book from memory, and to photograph the drawings in such a way that his personal handwriting as a draftsman disappeared. In this process of artistic re-creation, he worked on fundamental questions about the power and expression of images.

Vik Muniz has been exhibiting in museums around the world since 1989. In Brazil he is involved in social artistic projects for disadvantaged young people. He lives in New York and Rio de Janeiro.

Works

In his artistic work, Vik Muniz mainly deals with the reconstruction of known works of art or photographs. For this work Muniz experiments with a wide variety of materials, such as B .:

• Peanut Butter and Jam (Replicas of the Mona Lisa , 1999)
• Sugar (depictions of children on the St. Kitts sugar plantation, 1996)
• Chocolate (cycle about Sigmund Freud , 1997)
• Dust (2000)
• Diamonds ("Diamond Divas", Elizabeth Taylor , 2004)
• Earth (e.g. "Pictures of Soil", 1997; "A terra ea gente", 2007)

More recently, Vik Muniz has devoted himself more and more to large-format works and installations. The geoglyphs created in 2002 are representative of this : large-format works of art carved into the landscape on an open-air site near Belo Horizonte , Brazil.

Importance of materials for the work

The choice of the more exotic materials for his works has attracted Vik Muniz worldwide attention. For Muniz, the choice of materials is already a directional decision by the artist. In his opinion, the materials already "carry" a message and a statement. Above all, his work is characterized by a deep distrust of images and their power of manipulation. By reconstructing known photographs or works of art with new materials, he hopes to make this message clear in the otherwise hidden sub-text of the images.

This approach becomes clear in one of the most recent works by Vik Muniz: the picture cycle "A Gente ea Terra" (2007). This cycle consists of reproductions of ten photographs by famous Portuguese people (e.g. the fado singer Amália Rodrigues , the writer José Saramago or the football player Cristiano Ronaldo ). Muniz chose Portuguese soil as the material for these replicas. The earth, also with its various shades of brown, is intended to express the bond between man and earth in these pictures.

Awards

• 1999 - Líderes Latino Americanos para el Nuevo Milenio (CNN, TIME Magazine)
• 2005 - National Artist Award (Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Aspen, CO)
• 2005 - Premio "KAULAK" de Fotografía, Madrid

Exhibitions

• 1990 - "On the edge between sculpture and photography", Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art (USA)
• 1996 - "Some Assembly Required", The Art Institute of Chicago (USA)
• 1997 - "Seeing is Believing", International Center of Photography, New York (USA)
• 1999 - Liverpool Biennal of Contemporary Art, Liverpool, Great Britain
• 2001 - Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• 2001 - Official representative of Brazil at the Venice Biennale
• 2004 - Irish Museum of Art, Dublin, Ireland
• 2005 - "Best of Vik Muniz" - La Reserve, Paris, France
• 2007 - "Misumi Collection", Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan
• 2009 - Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Curitiba, Brazil.
• 2014 - "Pictures of Anything" Tel Aviv Museum of Art

Movie

In 2010 the English director Lucy Walker made the documentary Lixo Extraordinário (A special garbage), which documents Muniz's two-year work with the residents of the huge Jardim Gramacho garbage dump in Rio de Janeiro . Some of the catadores working there transform found objects into works of contemporary art. With the title Waste Land, the film has won numerous awards, including at the Sundance Film Festival and the Berlinale .

Web links

• Vik Muniz website

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Label Talk 2009: Vik Muniz. (No longer available online.) Williams College Museum of Art, archived from the original on October 2, 2013 ; accessed on September 18, 2012 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Biographical information based on data from the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal ( Memento of the original of October 12, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ↑ Information according to the official homepage of Vik Muniz
4. ↑ James Elkins: Vik Muniz - The Most Interesting Thing That Can Be Done with Representation Saatchi Gallery Daily Magazine
5. ↑ "Vik Muniz models portraits with haunting depth from Portuguese soil" - Article on portugal.germanblogs.de about Vik Muniz  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
6. ^ Anderson Ranch Arts Center
7. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from September 2, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
8. ↑ ( Memento of the original from November 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.