Vik Muniz

Vik Muniz is a New York based artist who experiments with media. His works are very interesting and consist of objects arranged to make an image which he then photographs the arrangement resulting in the final piece. He began his career as a sculptor in the late 1980’s after relocating from Brazil to Chicago and later to New York. Muniz’s work begins to take on its mature form with The Best of Life (1990) where he drew pictures of photographs included in the coffee table book “The Best of Life” from memory after losing the book in a move. The drawings were subsequently photographed and shown as photographs, a practice that Muniz continues.
Muniz followed “The Best of Life” with Equivalents (1993), Pictures of Wire (1994), and Pictures of Thread (1995) in which he developed the other aspect of his characteristic style by making the drawings out of readily recognizable non-art materials such as cotton, wire, or thread. This process of making a drawing out of a nontraditional material and then photographing it has been central to Muniz’s work ever since. Since then Muniz has gone on to work in many materials such as chocolate syrup, caviar, diamonds, junk, earthworks, etc. His way of art just fascinates me in such a way that it is almost unbelievable that he is able to produce a piece out of an everyday object. That is what I call imagination and creativeness to the extreme. I think that out of the many artists we have learned about in class, to me Muniz seems to be the most talented. After looking through his website and seeing all of the pieces he had created, not one of them was dull to me. I could recognize what all of the pieces were supposed to be and they were just all very put together. I would have never in a million years guessed that Sigmund Freud was painted in chocolate or that a landscape was draw out in thread. The talent and mind this man must have must be exquisite.





















-Jessica