Whenever someone wants to see if an artwork is 'real', the first gesture is to look at its back or at it's base; the part of it that normally isn't visible to anyone else but experts, dealers, museum conservators or the artists' themselves. This happens because while the image's objective is to remain eternally the same, its support is constantly changing, telling its story, showing its scars, its labels and periodic clichés. So when a cousin of mine told me his 7-year old could paint a Picasso, I told him 'probably, but he couldn't do the back'. As a teenager, I used to fix the neighbor's TV as a hobby. I wanted to learn how to fix clocks too. Whenever something's function is basically visual, there is always an opening in the back for the curious to do it damage.

                                                                  -Vik Muniz in an unpublished interview, 2005

For over 20 years Muniz has consistently defined art as a subtle connection between mind and matter by recreating iconic images while simultaneously revealing and debasing the process of their making. While keeping within the conceptual frameworks of Muniz's previously established images, Verso marks a return to the object-making that first brought him attention in the late 1980s.

Verso consists of a group of 3-dimensional trompe-l'oeils of the actual backs of such iconic works as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Van Gogh's Starry Night and Seurat's La Grande Jatte that, over a period of six years, Muniz photographed and systematically studied in partnership with the curatorial and conservation departments of MOMA, the Guggenheim and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as with a team of dedicated craftsman, artists, forgers, and technicians. These are disconcertingly faithful reproductions in a 1:1 scale realized in an inch-by-inch process that did not spare the slightest detail. Every scratch, dent or scribble is physically reproduced to photographic precision. Authentic looking labels, worn-away tape, faded pencil notations and actual period hardware and carpentry make it hard even for an expert to disbelieve they are seeing the actual backs of these masterpieces.

Along with Verso, Muniz will be exhibiting equally confounding recreations of the backs of famous photographs from the New York Times archive at MOMA. The backs are full of cancelled dates, yellowed newspaper captions and rubber cement stains.

Vik Muniz will be curating an artist's choice exhibition at MOMA this December. His retrospective, organized by the Miami Art Museum in 2006, is currently on view in Mexico City at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso. His work is in the collection of many museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre George Pompidou, the Centro Cultural Reina Sofia, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Muniz was born in Brazil and currently lives and works in Brazil and Brooklyn.

Vik Muniz - Verso
Vik Muniz
Sikkema Jenkins & Co. (view profile)
530 West 22nd Street
New York, N.Y., 10011

September 06, 2008-October 11, 2008

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