Vik Muniz

Brazil • Born in: 1961

Vik Muniz is a contemporary artist from Brazil born in 1961 in São Paulo. He currently lives in New York .

A child from poor neighborhoods, he discovered art in books he borrowed from the library and obtained a scholarship to attend evening classes.

One day, he witnesses a settling of scores in the street. Wounded by gunshot, he is offered a sum of money by the aggressor to preserve his silence. It was with this money in his pocket that he decided to move to Chicago, then to New York. He settled in Brooklyn and went on several jobs before joining a workshop. He then began his artistic activity with sculpture .

Vik Muniz definitely embarked on an artistic career in the early 1980s. Very quickly, he created a recognizable personal style for himself. The artist reuses waste and low-tech elements to create clean works, or reinvest in art classics. Dust, cigarette ends, puzzle, magnets, toys… Muniz is capable of transforming any material into a medium. He then takes a photograph of the assembled work. The illusion of the image disconcerts the spectators. Through his work, Muniz invites us to take a different look at familiar masterpieces in which he has inserted elements of everyday life.

Thanks to this approach, he obtained international recognition in 1997 with the series of paintings “Pictures of Chocolate", painted in chocolate. The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) then offered him his first exhibition. He repeated the feat in 2006 with the series “Pictures of Junk", this time made from garbage from our daily life as consumers and thus confirms its anchoring on the world contemporary art scene.

In the 2000s, he moved to Rio de Janeiro and worked for three years with residents living near one of the largest landfills in the world. They collect garbage for him which he will use to create works of art. He is filmed in his approach by Lucy Walker who will sign the documentary "Waste Land" in 2010, relating this adventure. The sale of these works at Sotheby's in London made it possible to redistribute the money earned - around € 250,000 - to the Brazilian community in question.

His work is exhibited all over the world, in renowned cultural institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York, the European House of Photography in Paris or at the Tate Modern in London.