Vik Muniz – Guest Curator at MoMA
Artist’s Choice: Vik Muniz, Rebus
December 11, 2008–February 23, 2009
MoMA, Special Exhibitions Gallery
11 West 53 Street,
New York, New York
(212) 708-9400
The Artist’ Choice is a series of exhibitions held by MoMA in which an artist serves as a curator to create an exceptionally personalized selection of artworks. For their latest show, MoMA invited renowned photographer Vik Muniz to select works from the museum’s vast collection, allowing him to leave his own distinguished mark on the exhibition.
Vik Muniz (Brazilian, b. 1961) is known for his extremely innovative way of presenting his creative ideas. He questions the function and traditions of visual representation by using unlikely materials, working with chocolate sauce, spaghetti marinara, or the detrius of hole punchers to render the subjects in his photographs. For this exhibition, Muniz has chosen a rebus, a combination of unrelated visual and linguistic elements to create a larger deductive meaning, as the organizing principle of his presentation.
The exhibition features approximately 80 works of sculpture, photography, painting, prints, drawings, video, and design objects selected and installed by the artist in a narrative sequence to create surprising juxtapositions and new meanings. Among the artists whose work was included are John Baldessari, Gordon Matta-Clark, Nan Goldin, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Eugène Atget, and Rachel Whiteread.
Aperture Foundation published the book Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer in 2005.
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Yellow, 1951, © Ellsworth Kelly
Yolk, 1999, © Kiki Smith
Timer Model No. 152, 1960, © Rodolfo Bonetto
Tags: Artist's Choice, MoMA, Nan Goldin, Vik Muniz
