Individuals
This tour-de-force of drawing, photographed and enlarged to human scale, is a delicious send-up of Abstract Expressionism and a witty demonstration of the mind's irrepressible quest for order in chaos. From the hours he spent drawing everything from geometric solids to the nude in a traditional São Paolo art school, Muniz retained a respect for craft and technique 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. Here, Muniz, like a modern Archimboldo, has deftly dripped and spattered Bosco 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 between surface and illusion, reality and representation.
Artwork Details
- Title: Individuals
- Artist: Vik Muniz (Brazilian, born Sao Paulo, 1961)
- Date: 1998
- Medium: Silver dye bleach print
- Dimensions: Frame: 152.4 × 127 cm (60 × 50 in.)
- Classification: Photographs
- Credit Line: Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1999
- Object Number: 1999.200
- Rights and Reproduction: © Vicente Muniz
- Curatorial Department: Photographs
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