Pictures of Anything
2014.9.22－2014.11.1
Long Museum West Bund
Organizer: B1, Long Museum
Artist: VIK MUNIZ
Pictures of Anything
2014.9.22－2014.11.1
Long Museum West Bund
Organizer: B1, Long Museum
Artist: VIK MUNIZ
The Long Museum West Bund is pleased to present the first comprehensive exhibition in China of work by internationally celebrated artist Vik Muniz. Pictures of Anythingencompasses various series produced throughout Vik Muniz’s extraordinary career, from his first photographic forays of the early 1990s to his most recent project created specifically for this exhibition, a strikingly bold large-scale colour photograph created using scraps of postcards to create a striking view of the iconic Great Wall of China. This exhibition presents Vik Muniz at his very best; playful yet serious, intriguing yet consummately beautiful.
Muniz is renowned for his ingenious and laborious employment of unusual materials - dust, sugar, chocolate, diamonds, blood, toys, magazines, junk, dry pigment - to reconstruct images, often referencing iconic works from throughout art history, that tap into the spectator’s subconscious visual repository and beg for further investigation. Muniz’s elaborate material creations are ephemeral; it is his masterly photographic documentation that is the final work of art, which is intentionally many steps removed from the original image that inspired it. Vik continually surprises and astonishes using new materials that fascinate and delight the eye.
The exhibition features strikingly bold large-scale colour photographs based on visually resonant paintings by artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter and George Stubbs. It is not just the final appropriated image that invites perusal, it is the minute components of the image that provides the irony, double meanings and visual associations for which Muniz is so well known. Highlights of the exhibition include optically rich renditions of The Great Wall of China, the Hong Kong skyline, Warhol’s Marilyn, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa¸ Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’AvignonandMichelangelo’s Creation of Adam.