TEL AVIV.- The first comprehensive exhibition of Vik Muniz (born in Brazil, 1961) in Israel covers 25 years of the artist's oeuvre.
His extraordinarily rich work, created primarily in series, reverberates Muniz' ongoing exploration of visual perception and representation, as well as his play on scale and perspective. The complex relationship between three-dimensional objects and a two-dimensional image is the result of a fascinating work process, which begins with fragile constructions of unexpected, ephemeral materials—dust, sugar, chocolate, wire, garbage—recreating conceptually loaded images culled from various sources, ranging from the history of art to science.
Muniz records the new images with his camera, producing lasting hybrid imagery in which the material is often antithetical to the image rendered. This brings to mind Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s portraits, composed entirely of objects, such as fruit, vegetables, flowers and animals. Muniz, who describes himself as a “low-tech illusionist,” explains in his exhibition catalogue The Imaginary Museum (Collection Lambert in Avignon, 2011), “Working with materials sometimes means working with the very essence of what a material has to offer. … The work defines the material and the material defines the work. … My work process has always been about this paradigmatic bind between the materiality and the concept in a work of art.”
Muniz lives and works in New York, USA, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He was the subject of the documentary film Waste Land (2010), directed by Lucy Walker, which won the 2010 Sundance Audience Award for Best Film and was nominated for an Academy Award. The film followed his work in collaboration with a group of catadores pickers of recyclable materials, in Jardim Gramacho a huge garbage dump located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.
The exhibition is held with the support of the Friends of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Israel, Sara Szold and Nili Lipman, and Hezi Cohen Gallery Catalogue published with the support of the Marc Rich Foundation
