Vik Muniz

Vik Muniz
CURATOR: Arthur Ollman.
MUSEOGRAPHY: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey.
GALLERIES: 1 to 4 | Ground floor.
ON VIEW: March 10 to June 11, 2017.
NUMBER OF WORKS: More than 110.

The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey presents the retrospective of renowned contemporary artist Vik Muniz (São Paulo, Brazil 1961), one of the most important, innovative and creative visionaries of our time, who has turned his work into the sort of art that plays with the illusions of the spectator: classic paintings and photographs of images created by combining a pop attitude in regards to the theme, with a pictorial point of view in terms of the unconventional processes and materials used.

The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey presents the retrospective of renowned contemporary artist Vik Muniz (Sao Paolo, Brazil 1961), one of the most important, innovative and creative visionaries of our time, who has turned his work into the sort of art that plays with the illusions of the spectator: classic paintings and photographs of images created by combining a pop attitude in regards to the theme, with a pictorial point of view in terms of the unconventional processes and materials used, including sugar, tomato sauce, diamonds, magazine clippings, chocolate sauce, dust, garbage, and more recently, individual grains of sand and bacterial organisms, thus carefully creating 3D images before photographing them with his camera.

His large scale photographs often quote iconic images from popular culture and art history, drawing on our sense of collective memory while defying the viewer’s process of perception. Famous for creating what he calls “photographic delusions”, his pieces have a traditional appearance but when the spectator moves in closer, he finds out that the original images are made up of unexpected materials that play with perspective and scale, an illusion, like for example, the classic recreated by Muniz: a Mona Lisa made with peanut butter and marmalade; a portrait of Jackson Pollock created with chocolate sauce; a Caravaggio Medusa recreated with spaghetti and tomato cause; a Botticelli Venus made out of junk. That revelatory moment when one thing transforms into another is of deep interest to the artist.

Although some of his projects use big and heavy equipment, his more recent work incorporates electron microscopes and manipulates microorganisms to unveil both the familiar and the strange in spaces that are typically inaccessible to the human eye. In addition to playing with scale, process and materials, Muniz also explores the ideas of appropriation, reproduction, truth and memory.