Vik Muniz Brazilian, b. 1961

Vik Muniz, born in São Paulo in 1961, is renowned for his unique employment of a wide range of materials, including dust, sugar, chocolate, diamonds, caviar, toys, junk, scrap metal, dry pigment, vintage postcards and magazine shreds, to reconstruct images that tap into the viewer’s subconscious visual repository and ask us to reconsider the familiar imagery in its altered form. His expansive practice explores how we are influenced by and derive meaning from images, examining the relationship between reality and representation, order and chaos, individual and collective memory, as well as the interaction between the whole and its constituent parts.

Muniz began his artistic career upon arriving in New York in 1983, holding his first solo exhibition in 1988. Muniz’s work has been exhibited in prestigious institutions worldwide, including the International Center of Photography, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Menil Collection, Houston; Museu de Arte Moderna São Paulo, São Paulo; Museu de Art Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome; Irish Museum of Contemporary Art, Dublin; Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv; and Long Museum, Shanghai. In 2001 he represented the Brazilian Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennale. Muniz is the subject of an Academy Award nominated documentary film entitled Waste Land (2010) and serves as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. His public art installation commissioned by the MTA Arts & Design for the 72^nd street Second Avenues Subway station, New York, opened in 2016. He was a creative director of the Rio 2016 Paralympics opening ceremony. Muniz’s work features in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Tate Modern, London.

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