Vic Muniz is a Brazilian artist known for his innovative use of unconventional materials to create large-scale photographs that challenge the boundaries between art, perception, and reality. Born in São Paulo in 1961, Muniz initially studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he developed his signature approach of constructing intricate images using everyday objects such as chocolate syrup, garbage, and dust.
Muniz’ work has been exhibited in major institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the São Paulo Museum of Art.
Victor Muniz’s “Pictures of Chocolate” series is among his most celebrated bodies of work. Muniz fuses the two main threads of postmodern photography — appropriation and composition – to create his artwork. Over the years he has remade, and then photographed, Corot’s landscapes from thread, Marilyn Monroe’s image from diamonds, and here, our illustration of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, rendered in chocolate. Muniz’s distinctive practice explores the instability that exists between craft and mechanical reproduction, between high art and popular culture, and between the ephemeral and the enduring.
Muniz recalls his first work in chocolate was a portrait of Freud revealing, “Chocolate is very complex – its color and density makes you think of guilt and romance.” Muniz’s process involves several steps. Staring from the top left of the “canvas” and working to the bottom right, he recreates the image using chocolate syrup. This version is then photographed, often before the syrup dries and loses its luster, capturing the fleeting nature of the medium.