Vik Muniz

Matthew Liu Fine Arts is pleased to present Vik Muniz, the New York-based Brazilian artist's first solo presentation at the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from March 18th through May 6th, 2016, with an opening reception on Friday, March 18th from 4-7pm.

Vik Muniz is a multi-disciplinary artist whose works ultimately takes the form of photography. For more than thirty years, Muniz has collaged and assembled from a variety of prosaic materials, such as pigment, magazine, scrap metal, thread, photo album, garbage and food-creating images in reference to recognizable images throughout the history of art and popular culture. With a seemingly playful sense of humor, Muniz put forward a quietly hopeful question: how do we perceive and understand this world without being influenced by our preconception? With his masterful use of unorthodox material, Muniz continuously surprises his audience by transmitting anything mundane into something perpetual and sublime.
Vik Muniz, the artist's first solo exhibition at Matthew Liu Fine Arts, features 14 works from several important series throughout his oeuvre. In Pictures of Magazines series II (2011-2013), Muniz employs torn paper pieces from popular magazines to recreate the iconic images of tourist sites and paintings. The intersection and rich layering of text and image render the masterpieces by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and Gustave Caillebotte delightfully kaleidoscopic, providing the viewers continuous visual pleasure. Postcards from Nowhere series (2014) addresses to the materiality of photography, reclaiming the values that has been increasingly leached away in our inexorable march for advanced technology. In creating The Picture of Pigment series (2005-2011), Munize sprinkled colored powder pigment over reproductions of several minimalist works and photographed them from above. Created in 2011, Crane demonstrates the artist’s belief that art can facilitate transformations in the society. Worked in collaboration with school children in the New York City, this work aimed to benefit the victims of 2011 tsunami in Japan.

Born in 1961 in São Paulo, Vik Muniz relocated to the United States in 1983 and has established his name as one of the most prominent contemporary artists. Muniz has actively exhibited his works in various prestigious institutions, including Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rome; Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo; Museu de Art Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and Long Museum, Shanghai. Muniz's work can be found in permanent collection of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain. Muniz was the subject of the document film Waste Land (2010), directed by Lucy Walker, which documented Muniz photographing the recyclers from Jardim Gramacho, one of the world's largest open-air landfill. The film won the 2010 Sundance Audience Award for the best film and was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 83rd Academy Awards. The artist currently lives and works in New York and Rio de Janeiro.