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Vik Muniz, born Vincent José de Oliveraie Muniz is a Brazilian visual artist, photographer and painter. Born in 1961 into a rather poor family in São Paulo where he discovered works of art not in museums but in books he borrowed from the library or from his high school.
Vik Muniz lives in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He began his career as a sculptor in New York in 1980 and became known worldwide in 1997 with his 'Pictures of Chocolate' series and again in 2006 with his 'Pictures of Junk' series.
In 2010, the documentary film 'Waste Land' follows Vik Muniz for 3 years in the realization of an artistic project in the heart of the largest landfill in the world, Jardim Gramacho, located in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro.
He expresses in his art a social commitment, as for his project with Lucy Walker nominated for the Oscars. He settles near the landfill, and sets up a participatory project: the workers of the landfill bring back the garbage and put it in place. One of his installations will be presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, on the sidelines of the Rio+20 climate summit.
He is represented by the Xippas galleries in Paris, Geneva, Montevideo, Punta Del Este and Brussels.
Thanks to this project, the garbage collectors of Jardim Gramacho have had worldwide attention. Before this report many people did not consider garbage collectors and after they saw that they are people with ambition and intelligence. The art that Vik made a lot of money for the people of Jardim Gramacho. With this money they were able to expand the Jardim association, build a library and a community center.
what material in medium. He uses photography to immortalize the images he creates from an incalculable diversity of media: earth, sugar, excrement, ketchup, wire, linen thread, rope, artificial blood, colored chips, modeling clay. , etc.
According to art critic Andre Seleanu: "Vik Muniz uses film photography to represent images and situations that he creates in line with the Brazilian conceptual art of the 1960s. His originality stems from the multiplicity materials he uses to execute his visual representations: peanut butter, tomato sauce, chocolate cream, jam, coins, confetti, dust, sand, caviar and diamonds. »
The other aspect of his art lies in the reproduction of famous works. Reproductions that deliberately mislead us since, among other things, Vik Muniz defines himself as a “low-tech illusionist” and raises the question of the illusion of images.
