Vik Muniz

Museum of Contemporary Art La Jolla

Since the mid-1990s, Brazilian artist Vik Muniz has been making photographs documenting his ephemeral pictorial reconstructions of famous images of well-known people, photojournalism, and art history. The artist utilizes an astonishing variety of materials including dirt, sugar, wire, string, chocolate syrup, peanut butter, ketchup, color chips, plastic toys, junk, and diamonds, to reproduce recognizable images and turn them alien.

Vik Muniz: Reflex surveys more than 100 photographic works produced from 1988 to the present. It comprises all of his major series to date, including images from the Best of Life series, in which he drew from memory well-known images from Life magazine examining the selective nature of memory; The Sugar Children, renderings of the children of Caribbean sugar cane workers rendered in sugar; and Pictures of Chocolate, which uses Bosco as a drawing tool. Works from Muniz’s newest series, including Pictures of Junk, Pictures of Pigment, and Mounds are also featured.

Vik Muniz: Reflex was organized by the Miami Art Museum, Miami, Florida, with support from Miami Art Museum’s Annual Exhibition Fund. Additional support provided by Duggal Visual Solutions.

The exhibition’s San Diego presentation has been made possible, in part, thanks to generous contributions to MCASD’s Annual Fund, as well as grant support from the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, the County of San Diego Community Enhancement Program, The James Irvine Foundation, and The Institute of Museum and Library Services, an independent Federal grant-making agency dedicated to creating and sustaining a nation of learners.