Vik Muniz Biography

As you learn more about Vik Muniz's life and work, you'll discover a world of imagination and artistic expression that transcends borders and resonates with people worldwide.

Vik Muniz (Vicente José de Oliveira Muniz), born on December 20, 1961, in São Paulo, Brazil, is a multifaceted artist, photographer, draftsman, painter, and engraver.

He employs various techniques to create his works and uses unusual materials such as sugar, chocolate, jam, ketchup, hair gel, trash, with photography as the primary resource.

Muniz began his studies at the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (Faap) in São Paulo, pursuing a degree in advertising.

In 1983, he left Brazil and settled in New York.

From 1988 onwards, Muniz created a series of works that primarily investigated themes related to memory, perception, and image representation in the arts and media.

"I do series, not work to create a masterpiece." (Vik Muniz)

Based on this concept, his work was titled with the name of the material used, such as: Wires Images, Terra Images, Chocolate Images, Sugar Children, and so on, always in Series.

Vik employed these elements to recreate figures from both the universe of art history and everyday life.

His work with recyclable material collectors at the Jardim Gramacho landfill in Rio was documented in the Documentary Waste Extraordinary (2010), which won awards at Sundance and Berlin festivals and was nominated for an Oscar in the category.

In 2014, the Santander Cultural exhibited in Porto Alegre the exhibition The Size of the World, with around 70 of his works.

In 2015, he participated in the 56th Venice Biennale with a 14-meter-long replica of a paper boat, called Lampedusa, which sailed through the city's canals, reminding the tragedies of illegal immigrants who sink off the European coast.

With great energy and creativity, Vik Muniz was one of the directors of the opening of the "Rio 2016" Paralympic Games.

Vik Muniz has much to share.

He is considered one of the most visible Brazilian artists internationally.

In 2016, the artist released a book documenting his nearly 30 years of career: Everything So Far | Catalogue Raisonné | 1987 – 2015, a two-volume box totaling 900 pages and documenting 29 years of production with around 1,400 works, including drawings, sculptures, and photographs.

For Vik Muniz, PHOTOGRAPHY ended up being the ideal support for the experiences in which he combines sculpture, painting, and drawing.

Photography symbolizes real objects, restored in memory.

They do not present the wear of time like sculptures or Greek temples that Vik visited.

For him, the photo does not include feelings or history – they are just forms and textures, perfect in their details.

Check out some of his series (works):

Divas and Monsters - 2005 - part of the series Images of Diamonds and Images of Caviar and consists of 12 colorful photographs composed of diamonds (divas) and caviar (monsters)

In this series, Postcards, of 2014, the artist made collages with hundreds of postcard cutouts from different places around the world, where he chose the most beautiful landscapes of photographs that were probably taken by him, being this his main artistic modality; photography is the mechanism he used until he reached the final art.

From a distance, the observer recognizes the aerial landscapes of Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Rome, and other selected places by Vik. As one approaches them, the feeling is one of surprise: one realizes that, in fact, they are enormous collages, made up of countless pieces of postcards from different eras of those places.

In this last image exemplified of the series "Castles of Sand", a new collaboration with the artist and researcher Marcelo Coelho, from MIT, Vik Muniz explores the microscopic world with a new series of castles engraved on individual grains of sand.

The process of obtaining a sand castle on a rock particle was anything but simple and involved over four years of attempts, using both advanced techniques.

First, he drew each castle using a camera lucida.

The drawings were then sent to Coelho, who worked with a series of microscopic drawing processes for several years, until deciding to use a Focused Ion Beam, which has the ability to create a line of just 50 nanometers in width (a human hair is about 50,000 nanometers wide).

Incredible!!!!