Vik Muniz: Hand Remade
Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA
June 8 – September 29, 2019
Artist Vik Muniz is known for manipulating familiar materials by hand, like chocolate sauce, diamonds or pieces of garbage, and re-composing iconic images from art history or pop culture. These painstakingly crafted constructions are temporary, while the photographs he takes of them constitute the final artwork. Adding to this transfiguration of materials, Muniz also alters their scale, creating monumental artworks with a mosaic of materials as fine as a grain of sand.
Pictures of Garbage is one of Muniz's most recognized series. in one of the world's largest garbage dumps, Jardim Gramacho outside of Rio de Janeiro, Muniz relied on local catadores or garbage pickers to supply him with discarded toilet seats, shoes and other refuse to recreate his famous works of art piece by piece.
In his recent series, Handmade, Muniz worked with materials such as paper, rope and fabric to create geometric compositions, Photography is central to Muniz's constructing of the imagery, but he also integrates physical materials into the final artwork. Fusing reality and representation, Muniz may layer ripped paper over a photograph of ripped paper or adhere rope to an image of an object bound with rope. "It always goes both ways," Muniz says. "What you expect to be a photo isn't, and what you expect to be an object is a photographic image."
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