Vik Muniz

The brain doesn't gather ideas from the flowerbed of idleness. It is above all through interaction with the material, through work, through effort and, ultimately, through failure, that we feed our store of ideas.

Vik Muniz is a Brazilian visual artist living in New York City. Muniz began his career as a sculptor in the late 1980s. Muniz became best known for his 1997 series Pictures of Chocolate and 2006's Pictures of Junk. In 2010, the documentary film Waste Land, directed by Lucy Walker, featured Muniz's work on one of the world's largest garbage dumps, Jardim Gramacho, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. The film was nominated to the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 83rd Academy Awards.

Vik Muniz often appropriates the images that serve as the basis for his artworks from works by other well known artists. For example, Muniz used jelly and peanut butter in the creation of the work Double Mona Lisa, After Warhol, 1999, based on a 1963 screen print by pop artist Andy Warhol and which, in turn, was an appropriation of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. In 2003 Vik gave a TED talk where he addressed the topic of creativity.

You can find some of Vik's works at Museu Berardo in CCB (Centro Cultural de Belém). The entrance is free but the exhibition will only be open until January 29th.