Brazilian artist Vik Muniz makes art by recreating well-known works from art history. In order to construct his artworks he uses everyday materials like peanut butter, chocolate sauce, sequins, sugar, colour pigment, tomato sauce, and general rubbish. His extremely time-consuming and detailed work is then finally immortalised with a camera and turned into beautiful photographs – often on a grand scale. Muniz’s images toy with our sense of perception and he calls them “photographic delusions”. What might at first appear to the viewer like reproductions of already existing artworks turn out to be, on closer inspection, innovative interpretations of pieces from our collective image bank.
The photographs in the series 'Aftermath' depict Brazilian street children. Muniz has for some time been involved in their situation and was therefore given the opportunity to collaborate with a few of them. He invited a number of the children, between the ages of 6 and 10, to explore art history in order to find works that they could identify with in some way. Muniz then took a black and white Polaroid of the children as they replicated the poses of the main characters in their chosen paintings. To build the imagery in 'Aftermath' Muniz collected detritus left on the streets of Rio de Janeiro after the carnival. The rubbish (confetti, bottle caps, cigarette butts etc.) was then placed on a light box and employing a method of removal – for example by using a vacuum cleaner – portraits of the children, based on the photographic originals, began to appear. Muniz’s prominence as an internationally recognised photographer began when a few of his photographs from the project 'Sugar Children' were chosen by MoMa to be part of the 1997 exhibition New Photography. In 2019 Muniz had a retrospective at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Atlanta, showing more than 100 photographs. For the last twenty years he has had several big exhibitions every year, all around the globe. His work is represented in some of the most prestigious art collections in the world including MOCA and the Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Museu de Arte in Sao Paulo, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at MoMa, New York. Muniz is as well-liked as he is famous in his home country of Brazil. He has initiated and donated money to a string of social projects, primarily in Rio de Janeiro, that offer education and work training for the city’s poorest and most vulnerable children. His documentary film 'Wasteland' (2010) was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary and won the Sundance Film Festival Audience Award: World Cinema Documentary.