Vik Muniz

If You Happen To Be In Atlanta

/ Amie Inman / Leave a comment

Vik Muniz Double Mona Lisa (Peanut Butter and Jelly), from the After Warhol series, 1999 Chromogenic print Galerie Xippas, Paris Art © Vik Muniz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

It’s easy to be a fan of Vik Muniz’s work on so many levels: his visual wit redefining materials as medium for art; his entrepreneurial use of art to bring attention to disenfranchised communities; the collaborative spirit clearly evident in so many of his works… I, personally, love his cheeky reproductions of the world’s iconic artworks, rendered in the most banal of mediums.

A mid-career retrospective, currently mounted at the High Museum of Art Atlanta covers the full range of his work from grand to microscopic scale, using diverse media—including food, dust, string, sugar, magazine clippings, and literal junk.

On view through August 21, 2016.

When Collaboration Is Everything, It Can Be Awesome

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“Sandcastle No. 3,” drawn on a single grain of sand, part of a Vik Muniz series from 2013.Vik Muniz, via Sikkema, Jenkins & Co.

We like it, for what should be obvious reasons:

At M.I.T., Science Embraces a New Chaos Theory: Art

By HILARIE M. SHEETS

As a graduate student at the respected M.I.T. Media Lab, Marcelo Coelho collaborated with the artist Vik Muniz to help him achieve a poetic and technical feat that teases the imagination: drawing a picture of a castle on a single grain of sand. After two years of failed experiments with various lasers, they finally began getting images of beautiful complexity using an electron microscope with a focused ion beam to etch superfine lines—when it didn’t pulverize the grains altogether. The tiny etchings could then be scanned and printed large scale.

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Mythology of Waste

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It’s been several months since Chinese conceptual artist Xu Bing orchestrated the monumental task of suspending a pair of 12 ton birds into the nave of one of New York City’s most famous cathedrals. Fashioned from salvaged construction debris from Beijing’s World Financial Center, the phoenix pair is reminiscent of the more 2-dimensional work of Brazilian artist Vik Muniz in both philosophy and meticulously layered execution.

Throughout China’s history, every dynasty has had its form of phoenixes. Representing luck, unity, power and prosperity, these mythological birds have, for the most part, been benevolent, gentle creatures. But this pair, fashioned from the materials of commercial development, reflect the grimmer and grittier face of China today.

“They bear countless scars,” Mr. Xu explained, having “lived through great hardship, but still have self-respect. In general, the phoenix expresses unrealized hopes and dreams.” Continue reading →

Metal, Craftily Crafted

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Brazilian artist Vik Muniz has been on our radar for quite some time.  Partially because his work redefines the concepts of waste and the proper “mediums” in art, but mostly because his work is just plain fun. While some previous series have used medium as bizarre as dust, granulated sugar or  melted chocolate, the prints exhibited at the 2013 New York Armory Show were created with the metal waste of the modern world.

Muniz is not only a master at recycling but at keeping his viewer completely off balance with his sense of scale. His 3 dimensional collages, whether made of scrap metal like the ones in the slideshow above, or with more “generalized garbage” as in the pieces depicted in the documentary The Waste Land, are orchestrated piece by piece from a 20 meter vantage point. For example, at first glance the hummingbird image looks as shimmeringly delicate as a Hupert Duprat/caddisworm collaboration, but wait! Are those paint cans, bed springs and automobile tire hubs I see? Continue reading →

Artifacts

/ Amie Inman / 1 Comment

When I posted about the artist Vik Muniz a few days ago I wrote primarily about his collaborative film with director Lucy Walker. I feel I didn’t do justice to the general wit of his work.  Like fellow artists Chris Jordan and Mary Ellen Croteau,  Muniz is an ultimate recycler, but his “puckish” personality informs his work, both through his choice of medium (sugar to create shimmering portraits of the children of cane workers on St. Kitts) or visual jokes (Pre-Columbian drip coffee maker). Continue reading →

Don’t Blink

/ Amie Inman / 6 Comments

The beautiful thing about garbage is that it’s negative; it’s something that you don’t use anymore; it’s what you don’t want to see. So, if you are a visual artist, it becomes a very interesting material to work with because it’s the most nonvisual of materials.  You are working with something that you usually try to hide. –Vik Muniz

Brazilian artist Vik Muniz is known for his visual wit using either the world’s detritus or the generally unexpected as the medium for his portraits and landscapes.  Each piece, formed by ink drops, chocolate drips, dust motes, thread swirls or garbage itself, is temporary by nature, achieving permanence via a camera’s lens. Continue reading →