Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
212-708-9400
New York
Special Exhibitions Gallery,
third floor
Artist’s Choice:
Vik Muniz, Rebus
December 14, 2008-
February 23, 2009

The Museum of Modern Art has selected Vik Muniz (Brazilian, b. 1961) as the ninth artist to participate in Artist’s Choice, a series of exhibitions in which an artist serves as curator, selecting works from MoMA’s vast collection to create an exhibition. In his work, Muniz inventively questions the function and traditions of visual representation by using unlikely materials to render the subjects in his photographs. For this exhibition, Muniz has chosen a rebus — a combination of unrelated visual and linguistic elements to create a larger deductive meaning — as the organizing principle of his presentation. The exhibition will feature approximately 80 works of sculpture, photography, painting, prints, drawings, video, and design objects selected and installed by the artist in a narrative sequence to create surprising juxtapositions and new meanings. Among the artists whose work will be on view are John Baldessari, Gordon Matta-Clark, Nan Goldin, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Eugène Atget, and Rachel Whiteread. Design objects will range from a wooden pencil to a kitchen pail to a Rubik’s Cube to finally, an Exit sign. The exhibition will be on view at MoMA from December 14, 2008, to February 23, 2009. It is organized by Vik Muniz, with Eva Respini, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.

Vik Muniz (born 1961) is a Brazilian-born, New York-based, American artist who experiments with media.

In a portrait of Sigmund Freud, he used chocolate to render the image. For his Sugar Children series, Muniz went to a sugar plantation in St. Kitts to photograph children of laborers who work there. After he returned to New York, he bought black paper and several kinds of sugar, and copied the snapshots of the children by layering the different types of sugar on the paper and photographing it.

Muniz 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 wire, thread, and Bosco Chocolate Syrup, out of which he produced a recreation of Leonardo's Last Supper. He has reinterpreted a number of Monet's paintings, including paintings of the cathedral at Rouen, which Muniz accomplished using small clumps of pigment sprinkled onto a flat surface. He made the images from sugar from the plantation.

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

At Neiman Marcus’s 81st annual Christmas Book in 2007 buyers could commission a Vik Muniz "His & Hers" chocolate portraits for $110,000 and receive a 60-by-48-inch museum-quality photo of the work. Muniz donated the proceeds of the sales to the Centro Espacial Rio de Janeiro, a charity arts organization for poor children and teenagers in Brazil. “Poor people need money,” Muniz said. “You need to help them directly. I don’t believe in political art — raising awareness — you have the newspaper for that.”

Recent Muniz solo exhibitions include Vik Muniz: Reflex at University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa, Florida, organized by the Miami Art Museum. Other venues for Vik Muniz: Reflex include Seattle Art Museum, PS1 Contemporary Center, New York, and Musee d'Art Compemporain, Montreal, Quebec. 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.

His work was also featured in The Hours – Visual Art of Contemporary Latin America (2007), Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

Past Artist’s Choice participants have included the architects Herzog & de Meuron (2006), Stephen Sondheim (2005), Mona Hatoum (2003), Elizabeth Murray (1995), John Baldessari (1994), Chuck Close (1991), Ellsworth Kelly (1990), and Scott Burton (1989).