Vik Muniz’s works are often created after masterpieces by artists such as Titian, Velázquez, or Klimt. In the mid-1990s, Muniz began to incorporate unusual and everyday materials into his photographic process. These materials included dust, diamonds, sugar, dry pigment and chocolate.
The photographic series “Pictures of Junk” makes use of domestic and industrial detritus to reinterpret paintings of the Greek and Roman gods. Using a warehouse floor as his canvas, Muniz creates arrangements of objects ranging from hub caps, tires, squashed coke cans, nuts, bolts, gaskets, pipes, coils of wire and broken appliances to an upright piano. These objects are then photographed from an elevated gantry, a vantage point that reduces their size. Muniz’s photographs are characterized by a provocative dynamism between the objects they contain and their subject matter.
The use of rusty detritus symbolizing the impermanence of life and the misguided emphasis placed on material possessions to commemorate the glory of the ancients may be read as an ironic commentary.

Less Reading...