Vik Muniz

Brazilian-born, New York-based artist Vik Muniz has risen to international acclaim for his visually sly and frequently socially conscious photographic experiments. Muniz’s inventive practice blends photography with unconventional materials to create intricate and thought-provoking images, making one of the most interesting voices in contemporary art today.

Muniz was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1961. Without any formal art training, apart from a partial scholarship at an art studio he won at the age of 14, Muniz began his career in the advertising industry in Brazil redesigning billboards. He moved to Chicago in 1983 and later to New York in 1984 where he rented a studio to become a sculptor.

Muniz creates images — detailed replicas of well-known artworks and meticulous portraits based on photographs — using unorthodox materials like chocolate syrup, cotton, trash, thread, sugar and diamonds. He then photographs these ephemeral compositions and translates them into glossy large-scale prints that belie their material origins. This sophisticated cross-media appropriative process produces a copy of a copy and undermines photography’s claims to authenticity.

The artist was featured in the Academy Award-nominated documentary film Waste Land (2010), directed by Lucy Walker. The film followed Muniz as he worked with catadores, or garbage pickers, from the world’s largest landfill in Rio de Janeiro to create large-scale portraits from recycled materials, highlighting issues of poverty, waste, and human dignity.

His work has been exhibited in prestigious institutions worldwide, including the Museums of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work is featured in the public collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and The Tate Gallery in London. 

In 2015 Christie’s sold Vik Muniz’s The Sugar Children: Valentina, the Fastest; Jacynthe Loves Orange Juice; Big James Sweats Buckets; Lil' Calist Can't Swim; Valicia Bathes in Sunday Clothes; Ten Ten's Weed Necklace (1996) for US$293,000, setting a world auction record for the artist.