Vik Muniz

Brent Sikkema is pleased to present Pictures of Magazines, an exhibition of new chromogenic prints by Vik Muniz. This series continues Muniz’s exploration of unconventional modes of drawing and the mechanics of perception in this age of visual overload. Here Muniz laboriously recreates still lifes by masters of the genre – Cezanne, Cotan, Fantin Latour, Gauguin, and Morandi – using miniscule hole punches from magazines which he assembles into collages and then prints large scale.

Juxtapositions of image and text within the magazine fragments lend a layer of unexpected humor to the works which are also characterized by the luscious color of the originals. Muniz captures the precise qualities that typify the works of the artists he references –the solid shadows of Cezanne, the luminous light of a Chardin and the texture surface of Morandi. Muniz’s versions are instantly recognizable as “great paintings” and then, a moment later, as photographs of flotsam from magazines. It is in this moment of spontaneous recognition and transformation that the collision between painting and photography is revealed.

Muniz is the subject of a retrospective, organized by the CGAC, in Santiago de la Compostela, Spain and currently on view at the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art, Dublin which will travel to the Fondacion Telefonica in Madrid. Born in Sao Paulo Brazil in 1961, Muniz has lived and worked in New York City since the mid-1980s. He has had solo exhibitions at the MACRO Rome, Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Menil Collection, Houston Texas, the 49th Venice Bienale, Brazilian Pavilion, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York the Centre National de la Photographie New York. His work is in the collections of major museums including the MOMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Reina Sofia, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New York Public Library, San Francisco MOMA, Art Institute of Chicago, the MFA Boston, the Tate London, The Solomon R. Guggenheim and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Pressetext

Vik Muniz