VikMuniz

Vik Muniz – Joan Miro Foundation

Barcelona, Spain

06/21 – 07/28/2002

Vik Muniz (São Paolo, 1961) lives in New York. Although he considers photography to be the most perfect form of painting, his pictures are far removed from reality and are never quite what they seem at first sight. By means of appropriation, he presents well-known images or works by other artists, past or present, reproduced in highly unusual materials such as chocolate, ketchup, ash, sugar, peanut butter, etc. With the skill of a craftsman, he works on all these offbeat ingredients in his studio and presents the results to the public in the neat, polished form of a photographic montage. Muniz re-examines the question of reality, so closely linked to photography, through the passage of the materials from one state to another and of the images from one version to another. In this way the childlike pleasure of messing around with coloured sauces gives way to a rigorous approach to form and is accompanied by a constant theoretical reflection on the way of producing and seeing contemporary art.

Muniz has lived in the United States since 1983. This year, the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York devoted exhibitions to him. Although he is well known around Europe and has shown mainly in Germany and the United Kingdom, his work has seldom been seen in Spain and never in Barcelona.

Exhibition page