Vik Muniz

Key (from “Earthworks”)

2006

Vik Muniz is a Brazilian artist currently working out of New York. 

Muniz is well known for his broad range of experimental works. While he started his career as a sculptor, his practice today is almost entirely photo-based — creating works but then photographing them. 

Muniz’s interest in human visual understanding is the running theme behind the majority of his work, of which a photograph called Key, from Earthworks is a perfect example. The "Earthworks" series also includes images of electrical outlets, tobacco pipes, footprints, scissors, dice, paper airplanes, envelopes, and coat hangers. The juxtaposition of intimate, inanimate objects and the living, changing landscape renders this photographic series truly striking. 

Muniz's innovative and shifting methods of visual communication are what constantly earn him recognition and admiration internationally. He frequently destabilizes the conventions of the art history canon by revisiting or appropriating conventions and icons but realizing them in unconventional materials and creative strategies. 

Muniz's work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art to name a few.

Find original Vik Muniz photography and other art on 1stDibs.

(Biography provided by Caviar20)