Vik Muniz

During April and May, Rena Bransten Gallery will present "Bulfinch's Recycling Yard: Vik Muniz Pictures of Junk" an exhibition of new photographs.

For his Pictures of Junk series Muniz has chosen domestic and industrial detritus to reinterpret Old Master paintings of the Greek and Roman gods by artists ranging from Titian to Velasquez. Using a warehouse floor as his canvas, Muniz's arrangement of everything from hub caps, tires, squashed coke cans, nuts, bolts, gaskets, pipes, coils of wire and broken appliances, to an upright piano, is photographed from an elevated gantry, the height reducing these objects to the size of brushstrokes.

The structural elements in Muniz's work whether wire or toys or, as in these images, junk, often play against the ultimate subjects of the photographs creating a provocative dynamism. Here the irony of using rusty detritus, in itself a symbol for the impermanence of life and the misguided emphasis placed on material possessions, to commemorate the glory of the ancients is too pointed to be ignored. If Thomas Bulfinch's "recycling" of myths and legends in his book The Age of Fable was intended as moral instruction for his and subsquent generations, then Muniz's rearticulations can be seen as a parable about the state of today's morals and values.

Vik Muniz was born in 1961 in Sao Paolo, Brazil, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and Sao Paolo. Muniz is currently the subject of an exhibition titled Reflex organized by the Miami Art Museum, Miami (2006 and traveling). There is a catalogue of the same title written by Muniz himself. Muniz's work is included in many museum collections including: The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The National Museum of Art, Osaka City, Japan; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Tate Gallery, London, UK.

Pressetext

Vik Muniz "Pictures of Junk Series"