Vik Muniz

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Vik Muniz (Brazil, 1961) is an avant-garde artist who experiments with novel media. For example, 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. Many of Muniz's works are new approaches to older pieces; he has reinterpreted a number of Monet's paintings, including paintings of the cathedral at Rouen, which Muniz accomplished using small clumps of pignment sprinkled onto a flat surface.

More recently he has been creating larger-scale works, such as pictures carved into the earth (geoglyphs) or made of huge piles of junk. His sense of humor comes through in his "Pictures of Clouds" series, in which he had a skywriter draw cartoon outlines of clouds in the sky.

Muniz has a 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, is currently also on display at the Seattle Art Museum and will travel to PS1 Contemporary Art Museum in New York in February 2007.

[edit] External links

• Official web site
• PBS Independent Lens feature
• It's a Leonardo? It's a Corot? Well, No, It's Chocolate Syrup from the New York Times