Highlights of the MOLAA Collection
VIK MUNIZ
(Brazil, 1961)
La Bacchante, after Gustave Courbet (from Pictures of Magazines 2, 2011
Digital c-print
Dimensions: 71 x 89.75 inches
Executed in 2011, this work is artist’s proof number 1 from an edition of 6 plus 4 artist’s proofs.
MOLAA Permanent Collection. Museum gift from the Tony and Trisja Podesta Collection.
Accession: M.2025.013.003
ABOUT THE ARTWORK
Vik Muniz recreates well-known works of art with common, yet unconventional materials, such as chocolate, garbage, dust, and sugar. He then photographs his collages before destroying them, saving three-dimensional collages as a two-dimensional photograph.
In his series Pictures of Magazines 2, the artist reconstructed famous images by superimposing and juxtaposing pieces of paper from various kinds of magazines. Muniz used paper, the material on which photographic images are printed, to reconstruct and meditate on key images by some of the twentieth century’s most influential photographers, including Garry Winogrand, Margaret Bourke-White, and Arnold Newman. He rebuilt images by tearing paper and assembling the curiously shaped pieces to resemble the contours of light and shadow in the pictures. In the series Pictures from Magazines 2 Muniz playfully recreated famous paintings by European and American artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Edward Hopper, Edgard Degas and Caspar David Friedrich.
For La Bacchante, after Gustave Courbet Muniz cut up colorful magazine pages and then assembled and applied them to reconstruct the French painter’s famous oil on canvas, produced between 1844 and 1847. The result, from a distance a recognizable reclining nude female figure, a Bacchante—a follower of Bacchus, the god of wine. However, up close, the material structure of Muniz’s montages is visible, revealing a multitude of images within images. The effect draws the viewer closer to deciphering the texts, faces, reclining figures, and other images that make up the composition and hint at the theme of La Bacchante. Using paper, a common material people deal with every day, Muniz transforms a famous nineteenth-century painting into an innovative, playful, and engaging experience; giving viewers the opportunity to construct new meanings.
Vik Muniz, La Bacchante, after Gustave Courbet (from Pictures of Magazines 2), 2011
BIOGRAPHY
Brazilian American artist Vik Muniz is a sculptor and photographer who is distinguished as one of the most innovative and creative contemporary artists of our day. He is playful and inventive in his approach to his work, inquisitive about techniques and about forms that develop from his innovative use of unconventional materials. Muniz was born on December 20th, 1961, in São Paulo, Brazil but moved to New York in 1983 at the age of twenty-two and developed the photographic work for which he is best known for in the 1990s. Muniz uses ephemeral or unconventional materials including sugar, tomato sauce, magazine clippings, chocolate syrup, and junk to recreate images from popular culture and well-known artworks, drawing on our sense of collective memory. He then photographs his assemblages. From a distance, the subject of each resulting photograph is discernable; up close, the work reveals the complexity and often unconventional materials from which it was created. The revelatory moment when one thing transforms into another is of deep interest to the artist. He playfully and skillfully re-creates work by some of art history’s most well-known painters, using a diverse set of ordinary materials to interpret compositions by Caravaggio, Leonardo da Vinci, Gustave Courbet, Mary Cassatt, and Andy Warhol, among others. The photographic print of his compositions is always the final product. They trick the eye, momentarily destabilizing our responses, leading us to contemplate the contradictions between reality and representation and opening the work to new readings, and enriching it with new meanings. His work transforms ordinary materials into extraordinary images that surprise, delight, and challenge our perceptions. Muniz’s works are included in the collections of museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL., Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, CA., The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY., the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY., Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM), São Paulo, Brazil, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK, and the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), Long Beach, CA.
