Mister Leisure and crew recently checked out the Vik Muniz show at the Miami Art Museum.

Vik grew up in São Paulo and currently lives in New York.  His work lies somewhere between painting, sculpture and photography and he uses unconventional materials in a way that is not only technically brilliant, but also smart, funny or poignant, sometimes all at once. 

Some of our favorites are his ”Equivalents," where he shaped tufts of cotton into cloudlike semirecognizable shapes, or ”Pictures of Dust,” where he painstakingly re-created works from the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection using dust collected from the museum itself.

He also did a series of “memory renderings,” re-drawing iconic photographs from memory and then re-photographing them in soft focus.  For “Pictures of Clouds,” he hired skywriters to draw cartoon clouds in the sky.  He did some earthworks, then some fake earthworks, photographing them both and challenging you to tell the difference.  He did two versions of the Mona Lisa, one in peanut butter and one in jelly.  And a portrait of Chuck Close made out of Pantone color swatches.

Some of the more striking new(er) work we saw included pieces made of plastic toys like this one along with the work he did with caviar and diamonds.  And a couple of pretty devastating self-portraits.

Some might find this gimmicky, but we don’t.

“Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer” is coming to the Seattle Art Museum in November.  The book is also great.

posted by mrleisure
11:33AM, 01 Apr 2006
[2 comments]