VIK MUNIZ

Vik Muniz (born 1961) is a Brazilian born, New York based artist who experiments with media. His works are fleeting and consist of objects arranged to make an image, he then photographs the arrangement resulting in the final piece.

Vik Muniz began his career as a sculptor in the late 1980’s after relocating from Brazil to Chicago and later to New York. His early work grew out of a post-Fluxus aesthetic and often involved visual puns and jokes. His most famous work from this period is “Clown Skull”, a human skull augmented w/ a clown-nose shaped protuberance.

Muniz’s work begins to take on its mature form with The Best of Life (1990) where he drew pictures of photographs included in the coffee table book “The Best of Life” from memory after losing the book in a move. The drawings were subsequently photographed and shown as photographs, a practice that Muniz continues.

Muniz followed “The Best of Life” with Equivalents (1993), Pictures of Wire (1994), and Pictures of Thread (1995) in which he developed the other aspect of his characteristic style by making the drawings out of readily recognizable non-art materials (i.e. cotton, wire, or thread). This process of making a drawing out of a nontraditional material and then photographing it has been central to Muniz’s work ever since.

The next major step in his career came with “Sugar Children” (1996) for which he received critical acclaim. The New York Times reviewed the show and Muniz was invited to participate in the 1997-1998 New Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Since then Muniz has gone on to work in many materials (chocolate syrup, caviar, diamonds, junk, earthworks and pigment to name a few) and has exhibited his work in major museums and galleries around the world. Recently, Mr. Muniz has curated a show at MoMA as part of the Artist's Choice series, seen the second printing of Reflex:A Primer (originally published by Aperture in 2005), and been featured in the award winning documentary Wasteland (2010).