Vik Muniz

Vik Muniz is a Brazilian born, New York based artist who experiments with media. His works are fleeting and consist of objects arranged to make an image, he then photographs the arrangement resulting in the final piece. He made two detailed replicas of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa: one out of jelly and the other out of peanut butter. He has also worked in sugar, wire, thread, and Bosco Chocolate Syrup, out of which he produced a recreation of Leonardo's Last Supper.

More recently he has been creating larger-scale works, such as pictures carved into the earth (geoglyphs) or made of huge piles of junk. Muniz's fascination with junk and garbage as an artistic medium led to the 2008 series "Pictures of Cars" which rendered famous Ed Ruscha paintings from the 1960s out of automobile parts and then enlarged to 5' x 10'. For his "Pictures of Clouds" series, he had a skywriter draw cartoon outlines of clouds in the sky.

Muniz has had solo exhibition at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa, Florida currently called "Vik Muniz: Reflex". This exhibition, organized by the Miami Art Museum, was on display at the Seattle Art Museum and the PS1 Contemporary Art Museum in New York. This exhibit then moved to the Musee d'Art Compemporain in Montreal, Quebec (Canada) until January 6, 2008. He has also published "Reflex - A Vik Muniz Primer" (2005: Aperture Foundation, New York) which contains a compilation of his work and his own commentary upon it.