San Diego, CA — For more than a decade, Brazilian artist Vik Muniz has been intriguing audiences worldwide with his photographs documenting his ephemeral pictorial reconstructions of famous images from the news, art history, and mass media. The New York-based artist utilizes an astonishing variety of materials including dirt, sugar, wire, string, chocolate syrup, peanut butter, dust, ketchup, plastic toys, and diamonds to reproduce recognizable images and turn them alien. Organized by the Miami Museum of Art, Vik Muniz: Reflex presents more than 100 works produced from 1988 to the present. The exhibition will be on view through September 2, 2007, at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla.

Playing with the viewer’s first perception of a familiar picture, Muniz makes it clear that representations are not always what they seem. “I want to make the worst possible illusion that will still fool the eye…. Illusions as bad as mine make people aware of the fallacies of visual information and the pleasure to be derived from such fallacies,” he explains.

Vik Muniz: Reflex includes works from all of Muniz’s major series, including The Best of Life, in which he draws mass media images from memory, photographs them, and reprints them using dot matrix; Pictures of Chocolate, well-known images that use chocolate syrup as a drawing tool; and Pictures of Diamonds, portraits of Hollywood stars made with glittering jewels. Works from Muniz’s newest series, including Pictures of Junk, Pictures of Pigment, and Mounds are also featured.

Muniz’s illusions have earned him critical acclaim and widespread recognition. Time Magazine named him one of its leaders of the new millennium and The New York Times has recommended his work as a sure-fire antidepressant, describing it as “an idea wrapped in surprise and laughter.”

Embedded in the accessible fun of Muniz’s images is a reconsideration and insightful subversion of artistic tradition and the meaning of images. “I have always taken humor very seriously,” Muniz says. “Humor and visual gimmicks operate at the most basic level of art appreciation. They create physical and perceptual responses that hold the viewer in front of the work a bit longer than usual. Once you achieve this tenacity, you can afford to be deep and erudite.”

While at first his works can be seen as witty visual double-entendres, they pose complex questions about how visual information is developed, presented, and interpreted. Muniz honors, questions, and subverts the traditions of representational art, treading the line between reality and illusion, representation and abstraction, idea and image, means and ends. In the process, Muniz exhibits a chameleon-like quality, continually shifting between roles as painter, sculptor, draftsman, photographer, writer, conceptualist, illusionist, critic, and historian.

Vik Muniz

Vik Muniz was born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1961. He attended art classes in high school but never went to college. Instead he began his career in advertising, an experience that galvanized his interest in the persuasive power of images and their susceptibility to manipulation. In 1984 he moved to the United States, settling in New York in 1986. His early artworks were trompe l’oeil sculptures—such as a deflated soccer ball meticulously cast in bronze and painted to resemble the real thing, or combinations of photographs and three-dimensional objects that blurred the distinction between object and image. In 1988, after losing his copy of the illustrated book The Best of Life, he began recreating his favorite images in the book as drawings that he then photographed. The questions these works raised about the nature of seeing and the role of photography led him to focus for the remainder of his career on what has been termed “the art of illusion.” He has worked in photography ever since, creating an astonishingly varied body of work that consistently probes the nature of visual representation.

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN DIEGO

Founded in 1941, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) is the preeminent contemporary visual arts institution in San Diego County. The Museum’s collection includes more than 4,000 works of art created since 1950. In addition to presenting exhibitions by international contemporary artists, the Museum serves thousands of children and adults annually at its varied education programs, and offers a rich program of film, performance, and lectures. MCASD is a private, nonprofit organization, with 501c3 tax-exempt status; it is supported by generous contributions and grants from MCASD Members and other individuals, corporations, foundations, and government agencies. Dr. Hugh M. Davies, The David C. Copley Director, has led MCASD since 1983. 24-HOUR MUSEUM INFORMATION: 858 454 3541 or www.mcasd.org