Vic Muniz until 15.04 Baltic, Gateshead (UK)

Pictures of People will also be the first significant exhibition to focus exclusively on his remarkable portraits and has been made possible with the support of Albion, London and Renos Xippas Gallery, Paris. With over 30 works on display, it will showcase several series of work from the period 1996 – 2006, including his famous series Pictures of Colors, Pictures of Chocolate, Pictures of Magazines and Monsters and Divas.
With a strong sense of irony and a playful vitality, Muniz breathes a breath of life into iconic figures – both past and present. Hollywood stars appear alongside artists, revolutionaries and mythical creatures, not forgetting a few self portraits.
Presented as photographs, Muniz’s portraits are drawings with a difference and never cease to amaze. From chocolate and ketchup to diamonds and caviar, his artists’ palette is nothing if not extraordinary. Though his images are familiar – borrowed from popular culture and Old Masters artists – they are never what they seem.
Using an approach that the artist calls ‘the worst possible illusion’, he transforms the mundane into the magnificent through his masterful manipulation of his cleverly selected materials. Marlene Dietrich and Sophia Loren sparkle in diamonds whereas Che Guevara emerges from the dark in cooked beans and the Creature from the Black Lagoon appears to us in drops of black caviar.
Muniz constructs these images in his studio and captures the often temporary result on camera, preserving his ‘drawings’ as photographs; pictures of pictures.
In Pictures of Magazines, hole-punched paper circles from glossy magazines are used to portray both Brazilian celebrities and ordinary people. Muniz developed this series as a response to his time spent in Brazil, a country in search of its own identity in the face of an ever encroaching cult of celebrity.
Muniz is compelled by the role of images and the way in which they circulate in our media saturated world. By raiding and responding to the conventions of art history, he consciously uses and appropriates images for his own purposes, while his use of unconventional materials undermines the role of the original image and questions art historical tradition. His portraits and self portraits are just one part of a diverse practice that has encompassed skywriting, land art projects and photographs of the microscopic.