Vik Muniz: Personal Exhibition

Muniz is celebrated for using everyday materials—sugar, chocolate syrup, wire, caviar, toys, dirt, dust, garbage, even magazine clippings—to recreate iconic images from art history. These large-scale, temporary compositions are meticulously assembled and then captured in high-resolution photographs, preserving their intricate detail while simultaneously transforming them into new, standalone works. Through this process, Muniz reinvents the masterpieces of Van Gogh, Picasso, Malevich, Klimt, Mondrian, Matisse, and others with wit and technical virtuosity.

Simultaneously, Muniz co-produced the documentary Waste Land (2010), which followed the lives of the landfill workers and the evolution of the project. The film garnered international critical acclaim, earning an Academy Award nomination and winning major prizes at the Berlin, Toronto, and Sundance film festivals. Proceeds from the sale of the artworks were donated to the Association of Collectors of the Metropolitan Landfill of Jardim Gramacho, and the landfill was officially closed in 2012. The project became a turning point—both in the lives of its participants and in Muniz’s own trajectory—marking the beginning of his sustained philanthropic engagement through art.

In 2011, Muniz was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. In 2014, he founded Escola Vidigal, a school of art and technology for underprivileged children in Rio de Janeiro. The following year, he participated in the Gates Foundation's global health initiative The Art of Saving a Life with his project Colonies, which explored the aesthetics of microscopic life.

Muniz frequently lectures at leading institutions including Oxford, Harvard, and Yale Universities; The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and other prominent venues such as TED conferences, the World Economic Forum, MIT, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

His works are held in major international museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); the Tate Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London); the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo; the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (MAM); the Menil Collection (Houston); the Long Museum (Shanghai); MACRO (Rome); the Joan Miró Foundation (Barcelona); the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin); and the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art.