Vik Muniz’s Belvedere Museum (The Kiss after Klimt) (Repro) (2017) reimagines Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (1908), one of the most iconic and recognisable images in the history of Western art. Klimt’s painting, with its gold ground and flattened, ornamental surface, has long existed beyond the museum as a cultural emblem. Endlessly replicated on posters, postcards and souvenirs, its intimate embrace is absorbed into popular consciousness. Muniz’s decision to restage this particular work is therefore not incidental. He selects an image that already lives multiple lives, shifting between masterpiece and merchandise, aura and commodity.

The work forms part of Muniz’s Repro series (initiated in 2016), in which the artist turns to canonical paintings and reconstructs them using printed matter sourced from exhibition catalogues, advertisements, museum leaflets and digital reproductions. For Belvedere Museum (The Kiss after Klimt) (Repro), Muniz assembled a dense collage of fragments culled from exhibition catalogues and art history books, meticulously arranged and then re-photographed. The resulting image hovers between coherence and disintegration: from a distance, Klimt’s entwined couple re-emerges; up close, the surface fractures into a mosaic of paper remnants.

Klimt’s original painting complicates depth and surface, dissolving the lovers into pattern and gold leaf. Muniz extends this tension. His collage foregrounds surface as accumulation – layers of printed colour stand in for gold tesserae, while scraps of text and imagery form a sedimented ground. The illusion of unity depends upon fragmentation. In this sense, the work becomes an allegory of collective memory itself, constructed from dispersed visual encounters and mediated experiences.

Muniz’s reimagining does not parody or diminish Klimt’s painting. Rather, it acknowledges the impossibility of encountering such an image outside reproduction. For many viewers, The Kiss is first known not in Vienna but in print or online. By reconstituting the painting from its circulating fragments, Muniz makes visible the conditions under which art is seen, remembered and valued today. The work asks where authenticity resides – in the singular object, in its reproductions, or in the act of perception that binds them together.

Vik Muniz, born in São Paulo in 1961, is one of Brazil’s most famous contemporary artists, renowned for his unique employment of a wide range of materials to reconstruct images that tap into the viewer’s subconscious visual repository and ask us to reconsider the familiar imagery in its altered form. 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 72nd 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.