Vik Muniz: FOTOCUBISMO

“I’ve always been drawn to Cubism which often causes us to question our reality – through shape, form, composition. It goes beyond the pure mathematical figure or a flat composition. To me it was an art movement which humanized these very general, traditional ideas of perspective and placed them in a tactile world of sensation and feeling.” - Vik Muniz

Ben Brown Fine Arts is pleased to announce FOTOCUBISMO, the gallery’s fourth solo exhibition in the London gallery of internationally acclaimed Brazilian artist and photographer Vik Muniz, opening this April.

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.

These abstract studies 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.

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 – originally 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.

“There is a place between the world of things and the world of ideas that, despite being seemingly small, nebulous, and even contradictory, enjoys its own constant energy and is in permanent and vibrant evolution. In the last thirty years, this has been my real place of work.” - Vik Muniz

Muniz has been exhibited worldwide and his work is included in major collections such as: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and Tate, London. He has been appointed UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador twice, in 2011 and 2020. Muniz represented the Brazilian Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001 and in 2010 was the subject of the Oscar-nominated and Sundance Film Festival award winning documentary feature film entitled Waste Land.