Vik Muniz: Brushstrokes

Ben Brown Fine Arts is delighted to announce Vik Muniz: Brushstrokes, the first exhibition of the artists bold and highly experimental Brushstrokes series at our London gallery. This new body of work extends Muniz’s longstanding exploration of visual perception, materiality, and the mechanics of image-making. In Brushstrokes, he turns to the very building block of painting – the brushstroke – reconstructing canonical images from the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist traditions through intricately layered photographic collages.

The series draws upon the works of Vincent van Gogh, Joaquín Sorolla, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir – painters who, between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, revolutionised pictorial language. Impressionism and its successors rejected academic rigidity in favour of perceptual immediacy, capturing the fugitive effects of light, motion, and atmosphere. These artists did not describe the world through line and contour, but evoked presence through colour – applied in loose, expressive marks that conveyed not exact likeness but lived sensation.

Muniz mines this history, reconstructing their compositions with sculptural swathes of paint – photographed, collaged, and reconstituted into works that oscillate between fidelity and fabrication. Look closely, and each mark is distinct: thick ribbons of ultramarine, ochre, or carmine. Stand back, and the image resolves with startling clarity – a sailboat skimming sunlit water, a still life of fruit, a dappled garden scene. The illusion is complete, yet the means of construction remain nakedly visible.