The Pictures of Magazine 2 series of works

Don’t miss the chance to visit Vik Muniz’s exhibition Pictures of Magazine 2 in Xippas Gallery, Athens. The show will last until September 29, 2012. This new series of works is exhibited simultaneously in Galerie Xippas, Paris and Xippas Art Contemporain, Geneva. The Brazilian artist Vik Muniz is well-known for recreating famous artworks with diverse, ephemeral materials (grains of sugar, chocolate syrup, ketchup, peanut butter, caviar, dust, ash, thread, diamond dust) and photographically reproducing them in large format. In his third solo show in Greece, Vik Muniz chooses to work with ‘intellectual’ garbage and its physical embodiment. The current informational overload which creates an irrevocable necessity for immediate consumption of printed material and constant news feed, leaves behind plenty of raw material for Muniz’s new works: irregular pieces and stripes from magazines with images or text comprise the work’s structural material. Historic works of the 19th century by Manet, Cézanne, Van Gogh and others are recomposed using shreds of pictures of persons from advertising campaigns, celebrities, comic book heroes, together with parts of titles and subtitles, syllables from words and fragmented phrases. The significant difference with his previous series is that in Pictures of Magazine 2 the image and its components have the same importance, as every shred continues to carry its own strong visual or intellectual impact. The viewer is invited to perform a double recall: to evoke and process information he had normally overlooked in the recent or distant past and to ‘see’ at the same time the reconstructed image by recomposing the original. From visitgreece