Attic Art

The largest retrospective ever mounted for Brazilian artist Vik Muniz is shaping up to be one of the year’s most talked-about museum shows worldwide — and it’s free to attend. Muniz (b. 1961) has built his career on reconstructing images, often lifted straight from art history, out of materials that have no business being art supplies: chocolate, sugar, pigment dust, scraps of household junk. It’s the gap between what these pieces are made of and what they depict that gives the work its punch, and that gap regularly opens onto something political. One of his best-known bodies of work — portraits of waste-pickers built entirely out of garbage from the landfill where they worked — expanded into both photography and a documentary film, which have previously screened in Moscow.

What sets this retrospective apart from past Muniz surveys is scope: alongside the photographs (Muniz builds his images, photographs them, then destroys the physical originals) is a substantial body of sculpture — the medium he started in, and the one he’s circled back to in recent years. Built specifically for the show is a Ferrari Berlinetta: a toy car Muniz owned as a child, blown up here to the scale of a real vehicle. Also on view are several pieces from his Museum of Ashes series, made in response to the 2018 fire that destroyed Brazil’s National Museum in Rio de Janeiro — objects literally reconstructed from ash salvaged from the wreckage, part of an ongoing effort by Muniz to raise funds for the museum’s restoration.

Suspended in the rotunda of the Cultural Center of Bank of Brazil is an eight-metre pterosaur built from plastic and ash, while the floor beneath it holds a massive carpet reproducing Muniz’s well-known Medusa Marinara (1997), in which the mythological figure is rendered entirely in pasta and tomato sauce. The show also revisits Muniz’s signature series — including The Ganges/Verso, in which he reproduced the literal reverse side of major painted masterpieces, the side no viewer ever sees, and Colonies, a collaboration with a biologist in which paintings were effectively grown using living microorganisms.