Courtesy Arndt & Partner, Berlin/Zurich

Vik Muniz, "Shovel (Sossego, Copper Mine)" (2006). From the series "Pictures of Earthwork" (2006). Gelatin silver print, 24 x 20 in.

February 2009 Reviews

Tetsumi Kudo

Giorgio Morandi

Italics

White Columns Annual

Ari Marcopoulos

Lisa Sanditz

Omer Fast

Sarah Lucas

Jost Münster

Charline Von Heyl

Hannah Villiger

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Perusing the several series of photographs (taken over the past three years) in Brazilian artist Vik Muniz’s first show in Germany, one wondered at the skill — and possible masochism — of the man behind the work. Muniz has gained a reputation for replicating some of the greatest icons of art history and most provocative images from our era using fragile and impermanent materials such as dust and sugar. That the viewer sees only the photographic record of these painstaking re-creations — the re-creation is discarded after being photographed, leaving just a tantalizing vision of what was probably a deliciously tactile surface — is, one feels, the point. This is particularly evident in the series "Pictures of Pigments" (2007-08), where Muniz re-created a number of abstract paintings in vivid-colored pigment and then photographed them. The most strikingly delectable of these is Flag, After Jasper Johns (2007): as one draws close the work resembles an iced cake kept frustratingly away from longing fingers.

Perhaps Muniz enjoys refusing us the pleasure of the real, preferring to keep us away from the surfaces he delights in, as in the collage of handmade paper he created to remake Untitled Film Still #7, after Cindy Sherman (2008). Distinct in material (the most remarkably divergent being the dramatic "Pictures of Earthwork" [2005-06] photo-graphs of vast images etched into iron, copper, and manganese mines), the images are united by a common bond: control and the absence of tangible physicality. Muniz’s art is about what you allow someone to see but not feel, know but not experience, and the setting for his show, near Checkpoint Charlie, couldn’t be more apt — a space pregnant with the profound pain and frustration of separation. "Vik Muniz" originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' February 2009 Table of Contents.