Image at the cover of the exhibition catalog. Though February 14, the Vale Museum at Vila Velha, in Espirito Santo state, displays the largest exhibition to date in Brazil of this quasi-national hero. Brilliantly, the cycle of luxury materials led him to his next phase with the most common byproducts bred by our consumer society: junk and garbage.
By then, he arrived at the pinnacle of the art world. But it was only in the next year he would finally become a household name in Brazil. Sometimes classified as a photographer, Muniz is a multimedia artist who uses the camera to finalize his experiments.
Zigzagging from A to Z, his artworks continue to trail meticulous reconstructions fueled by his boyish curiosity. Dangling from a helicopter, he shot his macro drawings carved by bulldozers depicting banal objects: a clothes hanger, an umbrella, a wall socket, a footprint.
His inquisitiveness then zoomed to the opposite end of the spectrum. With a hand from the MIT Lab, since , some of his experiences have brought scientific technology to the realm of the arts. Vik Muniz, Sandcastles series 10, , Digital C-print, You sometimes mention you feel like an impostor. I guess my need for this stems from the fact I was never exposed to much education. However, being an imposter actually helps me out in some ways. My parents were very poor, my dad was a. She taught me to read when I was four by dragging my fingers over the words of an Encyclopedia Britannica—the only set of books we had at home.
She would tell me what words meant and the feeling they evoked. Without having ever been to school, she taught me how to read the same way she taught herself. How did this spontaneous education reflect on your work? Believe it or not, non-education has its benefits. My notebooks seemed like the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was the only one able to decipher them and I became known in school as the kid who drew well. It was the happiest day of my life. I met kids like me involved in a relationship with the world that most others had lost.
