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Individuals, from the series Pictures with Chocolate, 1998
Vik Muniz (Brazilian, b. 1961)
Silver dye bleach print; 60 x 40 in. (152.4 x 101.6 cm)
Purchase, Anonymous Gift, 1999 (1999.200)

Description

This tour de force of drawing, photographed and greatly enlarged, is a delicious send-up of Abstract Expressionism and a witty demonstration of the mind's irrepressible quest for order in chaos. Muniz retained the respect for craft and technique from his classical training in a traditional São Paolo art school even as he took his skills as a draftsman to decidedly untraditional subjects and materials. In recent series he has used photography to transform twisted and bent wire into delicate line drawings, skeins of thread into lush drypoints à la Corot and Daubigny, and wads of cotton into clouds with an uncanny resemblance to familiar objects. In Individuals Muniz, like a modern Archimboldo, has deftly dripped and spattered Bosco syrup in a high-contrast rendering of a generic photograph of fans at a sporting event. Tiny dabs of chocolate syrup become the faces of those who cheer or despair at the game unfolding before their eyes, but the true competition here is one between surface and illusion, reality and representation.

(Entry written by Malcolm Daniel)

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