A broad selection of the artist’s most iconic and revered works from the last two decades has been brought together at Ben Brown Fine Art in London.
Ben Brown Fine Arts in London opened Vik Muniz: A Brief History of Art on Tuesday, February 1st , coinciding with his 60th birthday.
The exhibition brings together a selection of the artist's most iconic and revered works from the past twenty years.
Inspired by artists across centuries and artistic movements, from Sandro Botticelli and Francisco Goya to Van Gogh and Gerhard Richter, the show presents reimaginings of famous masterpieces from the early Renaissance to the 21st century.
Vik Muniz uses a wide range of unconventional materials, including dust, sugar, chocolate, diamonds, caviar, toys, photographic paper, scrap metal, dried pigments, vintage postcards, and magazine scraps to recreate and reference iconic images. These material constructions are photographed, then enlarged or reduced in scale, with the final artwork becoming a documentation of his conceptual and artistic processes.
Reconstructing images that tap into the viewer's subconscious visual memory, these works ask us to reconsider familiar images in their altered form. When the viewer looks, they know they've seen it before, but upon further inspection, they know it's far removed from the original object. Through examination, more details are revealed, creating a narrative: in doing so, Muniz describes the story that might lie within an image, capturing its subjectivity. The ordinary materials he uses expose a political underbelly, and the final works become an examination of how we define our modern society.
The exhibition will be spread across the gallery's two London locations. It will remain open to the public until March 15, 2022.
"I always try to create things that have a relationship between the parts and the whole. The idea of a mosaic is quite interesting, because you have both the image and the material trying to fight each other. It's not something fluid like pencil and ink: they are pieces of things. This creates a tension between material and subject." Vik Muniz
Courtesy Ben Brown Fine Art