Vik Muniz – FOTOCUBISMO
20 April – 26 May 2023
Ben Brown Fine Arts
12 Brook’s Mews, London W1K 4DG
Exhibited for the first time in the United Kingdom, FOTOCUBISMO features work from Muniz’s most recent Surfaces series, which explores concepts of perception, reality, and representation while challenging traditional notions of materiality. Muniz’s work often draws on influences from classic and iconic images, often culled from art history. Looking to Cubist masters such as Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris and Georges Braque, these unique works are a result of the artist’s hybrid technique of photographing handcrafted, three-dimensional elements – most notably painting and collaged components – which are reprocessed through photographic collages. Muniz’s newest works invite viewers to question and explore what lies beneath the surface, and to dissect each layer amidst the overlapping interventions.
Vik Muniz is renowned for his complex photographic works and unique employment of a wide range of unconventional materials, including dust, sugar, chocolate, diamonds, caviar, toys, junk, scrap metal, dry pigment, vintage postcards, and magazine shreds. Most crucial for Muniz – origi- nally a sculptor – is the idea of photographic representation, and the complex relationship between photography and mental images as memory or imagination, which have been the backbone of his photographic work for the past thirty years.
The works in FOTOCUBISMO compel the viewer to closely investigate the dichotomy between the physical object and its depiction, while at the same time reinventing the possibilities and questions around the construction of a photographic image. This exploration of iconic images from art history, which Muniz has repeatedly revisited throughout his career, furthers the artist’s investigations into the contradictions between visual perception, the physical world and art historical context.
www.benbrownfinearts.com
Image: Still Life with Bordeaux Wine, after Juan Gris (Surfaces), 2022
