Vik Muniz: Surfaces

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Ben Brown Fine Arts is pleased to announce SURFACES, our fifth solo exhibition at the Hong Kong gallery of internationally acclaimed artist Vik Muniz. The exhibition features new works from Muniz’s most recent series, Surfaces, which explores concepts of perception, reality, representation and materiality. Based on extensive research of iconic works by Cubist and 20th century masters including Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Paul Cézanne, Fernand Léger and Giorgio Morandi, Muniz creates these unique works using a hybrid technique of photographing handcrafted, three-dimensional elements – most notably painting and collaged components – and reprocessing them through photographic collages. The Surfaces works invite the viewer to question what lies beneath the surface and explore the dichotomy between the physical object and its depiction, stimulating and expanding the expectations of one’s visual repository.

Muniz has long been fascinated by the revolutionary ways in which the Cubists disrupted traditional notions of perspective and perception, bringing tactility, sensation and multi-dimensionality to one surface, and through this series lauds their innovations with reverence, playfulness and contemporary thought. Quarry at Bibémus, after Paul Cézanne (Surfaces), 2023, captures the geometric construction and fractured, shimmering light of Cézanne’s landscape paintings through heavy, hand-collaged layers of ochre photographic paper and graphically cut layers of brush and sky. Numerous works in the exhibition pay homage to Italian artist Morandi’s serene, serial still-life paintings of jugs and vessels in variable compositional arrangements, with Muniz literally realising the volumetric contours of the objects and accentuating the brushstrokes of subtle tonal variations the artist was renowned for. Iconic works by Picasso such as Guernica and Girl before a Mirror are reimagined employing Muniz’s trompe l’oeil methodology of transforming the artworks into three-dimensional multi-media collages.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Vik Muniz was born in São Paolo, Brazil, in 1961 and currently lives and works in both New York and Rio de Janeiro. His work has been exhibited in prestigious institutions worldwide, including the International Center of Photography, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Menil Collection, Houston; Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo; Museu de Art Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome; Irish Museum of Contemporary Art, Dublin; Tel Aviv Museum, Israel and Long Museum, Shanghai.

His work features in the collections of 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; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and Tate, London. In 2001, Muniz represented the Brazilian Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennale. Vik Muniz is the subject of an Academy Award-nominated documentary and Sundance Film Festival award-winning documentary film Waste Land (2010) and serves as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. In 2016, Muniz was commissioned by MTA Arts & Design to create a permanent installation in the New York City subway systems and that same year was a creative director of the Rio de Janeiro Paralympics opening ceremony.