Vik Muniz

Vik Muniz was born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1961. He attended art classes in high school but never went to college. Instead he began his career in advertising, an experience that galvanized his interest in the persuasive power images and their susceptibility to manipulation. In 1984 he moved to the United States, settling in New York in 1986. His early artworks were trompe l'oeil sculptures-such as a deflated soccer ball meticulously cast in bronze and painted to resemble the real thing, or combinations of photographs and three-dimensional objects that blurred the distinction between object and image. In 1988, after losing his copy of the illustrated book The Best of Life, he began recreating his favorite images in the book in drawings that he then photographed. The questions these works raised about the nature of seeing and the role of photography led him to focus for the remainder of his career on what has been termed "the art of illusion."

Muniz has exhibited internationally since 1989. He has had one-person exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York (1998, traveled); the Museu de Arte Moderna in Sào Paulo and Museu de Art Moderna in Rio de Janeiro (2001); the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2001); the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona (2002); the Menil Collection in Houston (2002); the Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporanea in Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2003); the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, in Rome (2003); the Fundación Telefonica in Madrid (2004) and the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art in Dublin (2004). He was the Brazilian representative at the 49th Venice Biennial (2001) and created a commissioned work for the exterior of the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, NY (2003).

He has been included in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Art (1995); The Art Institute of Chicago (1996); the XXIV International Biennial of São Paulo (1998); The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1999); the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial (2000); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2002); and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2003).

Vik Muniz: Reflex will be the first traveling exhibition of his work in the United States since his 1998 survey at the International Center of Photography in New York, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and the Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga Springs, NY. (Miami Art Museum, 2005)