The artist Vik Muniz on cubism, exploring the super-real, and embracing a future of autonomous digital imagery
The acclaimed artist Vik Muniz has been toying with our perception of reality via the lens of art history for nearly three decades, and his latest show at Ben Brown Fine Arts is no exception, featuring intricately layered re-imaginings of classic artworks from the cubist movement that are something akin to a conceptual hall of mirrors, with each ingenious twist making us look once again at what we thought we already knew so well. The utterly entrancing FOTOCUBISMO features work from the artist’s renowned Surfaces series, and brilliantly exemplifies his unique style, consisting of countless photographed pieces of hand-crafted paper semi-collaged into three-dimensional versions of iconic works by the likes of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque – presenting their now familiar, yet once radical, abstraction of the human form in a thoroughly modern context. As such, these latest works push viewers to explore what lies in the shadows and beneath the surface, dissecting each layer amidst myriad overlapping interventions.
Here, the artist speaks to Port about employing confusion to create discernment, and heralds a brave new world in which the untethered photographic image is free from any relationship to so-called reality.
