Vik Muniz Artist Analysis

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Vik Muniz

Vicente José de Oliveira Muniz, known as Vik Muniz born 1961, Paulo, Brazil, is a visual artist living in New York City and Rio de Janeiro. Muniz began his career as a sculptor in the late 1980s. In 2010, the documentary film Waste Land, directed by Lucy Walker, featured Muniz's work on one of the world's largest garbage dumps, Jar dim Gramacho, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. The film was nominated to the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 83rd Academy Awards.

Muniz arrived in New York in 1983 and worked as a framer. He also took theatre and scenography classes at the New School and the New York University. A friend lent him a studio, where he started his career as a sculptor, which led him to his first solo exhibit in 1988. His next phase was experimenting drawing and photography. By portraying kids from a Caribbean island using sugar and photographing this work, he had gained exposure and was chosen by the Museum of Modern Art to its "New Photography" exhibit in 1997.

What I like about Vik Muniz is that he uses different materials to produce art works, when people think artist they normally think they can draw and paint but Vik brought another revolution to art, the idea of using materials such as ketchup and sugar to produce a piece of art sold for millions is inspiring, Vik mainly focuses on portraiture, from what I can see from his work he likes to focus on the facial features rather than any scenery.

The art work is called “Wasteland” and it has materials that is worn out, torn and found on the floor and i actually love this piece because of its colours and the meaning behind it.
Vik has many female figures in his works so that relates to my project as we had to use Vik Muniz’s style to transform an area of the “Guernica” from, I studied the women holding the dead child that is why this piece is relevant to my

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