Vik Muniz
Vik Muniz ( b. 1961 in São Paulo) is a worldwide Brazilian artists and exhibition curator. He lives and works in New York and Rio de Janeiro.
Biography
Vik Muniz grew up in Brazil and attended various courses there on the fine arts, without formally completing a university. In the early 1980s, he began a career in the advertising industry. Here, his interest in the power of images and their power to manipulate developed. 1984 moved Vik Muniz in the United States. He left in 1986 to settle in New York.
Muniz had the photo book The Best of Life with a selection of photos that were published between 1936 and 1972 in the American Life magazine. He started his favorite pictures from the photo strip out of memory to draw, and to photograph the drawings so that his personal handwriting disappeared as a draftsman. In this process of artistic creation he worked on fundamental issues relating to power and printing of images.
Since 1989, Vik Muniz worldwide in museums. In Brazil, he is active in social art projects for disadvantaged young people. He lives in New York and Rio de Janeiro ..
Works
Vik Muniz engaged in his artistic work primarily with the reconstruction of well-known works of art or photographs. For this work, Muniz experimented with different materials, such as:
- Peanut butter and jelly ( replicas of the Mona Lisa, 1999)
- Sugar ( images of children on the sugar plantations of St. Kitts, 1996)
- Chocolate ( cycle through Sigmund Freud, 1997)
- Dust ( 2000)
- Diamond ( " Diamond Divas ", Elizabeth Taylor, 2004)
- Earth (eg "Pictures of Soil", 1997; "A terra ea gente ", 2007)
More recently, Vik Muniz devoted increasingly large -scale works and installations. Representative of these are from 2002, the geoglyphs called: large format, on a free site in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in the countryside ingrained art.
Meaning of the materials for the plant
The choice of the more exotic materials for his works has brought worldwide attention Vik Muniz. For Muniz is in the choice of materials is already a choice of direction of the artist. In his view, "carry" the materials a message and testimony already in it.
His work is characterized primarily by deep distrust of images and their manipulation force. By reconstructing known photographs or works of art with new materials, he hopes to make this message in the otherwise hidden subtext of the images clearly.
Clearly, this approach is at one of the most recent works by Vik Muniz: The cycle of paintings "A Gente ea Terra " (2007). This cycle consists of the replication of ten photographs by famous Portuguese ( fado singer Amália Rodrigues eg, the writer José Saramago, or the soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo ). For these replicas Muniz chose Portuguese as earth material. The Earth, with its different shades of brown, is to express the connection between man and earth in these images.
Awards
Exhibitions
Film
In 2010, the British director Lucy Walker filmed the documentary Lixo EXTRAORDINARIO ( A special waste), which documents the two years of work Muniz ' with residents of the huge garbage dump in Rio de Janeiro Jardim Gramacho. Some of the work there catadores transform found objects into works of contemporary art. The film was awarded the title of Wasteland with numerous awards, including at the Sundance Film Festival and the Berlinale.