Vik Muniz

The photos are mine but the text I have taken from the MON website, where the exhibition Vik Muniz took place in Curitiba. For more information, please access the link: http://www.museuoscarniemeyer.org.br/exhibitions/vik.html

From Sao Paulo to New York

Vik Muniz was created in São Paulo, where he began his art studies, and came to the United States thanks to an accident. After break up a street fight, he was hit by a shot in the leg. The author of the shot, trying to compensate his attitude, offered Vik a good sum of money, which funded his trip to Chicago in 1983. Two years later, he went to New York, where he still lives. Success, however, came 14 years ago, when his work was seen in a gallery by a critic of the New York Times. The article has opened doors and earned an invitation to the exhibition New Photography at MoMA and the acquisition of his work on the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Today his works are in private collections and galleries across continents and in museums like the Tate Modern and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Getty Institute in Los Angeles, and MAM in Sao Paulo. Recently, the recognition of his work earned him an invitation from the MoMA in New York for curators to the prestigious Artist's Choice (Choice of Artist), held last December at the headquarters of the museum - the first time for a Brazilian. Vik Muniz is still the only living Brasilian to appear in the book 501 Great Artists of All Times, Penguin Books.

Creative Process

Initially intended as sculptures, Muniz noticed in the early 90s that documenting his art through photography, he got an artistic result better than the sculpture itself. Since then, Vik decided to unite the two languages, to which he added others, such as drawing, painting and collage.

Before capturing as a photographer, what will become the final product of his work, Vik creates a true theater of scenes, portraits, objects and images, some on a gigantic scale, using elements as diverse as shredded paper, junk, sauces and cotton in a construction processes that can take weeks or even months.

That is how some of his works were created, such as the soldier made up of many toy soldiers; the Medusa of pasta and marinara sauce; and pictures of the actress Monica Vitti composed of hundreds of tiny diamonds.

The material used on his art is not accidental, like in the series Children of Sugar, 1996, which recreated with sugar, pictures of children who Vik met at the Caribbean. An aesthetic metaphor about the "childlike sweetness".