Pictures of Garbage, 2008-11

Vik Muniz is a Brazilian artist, photographer and sculptor. He is famous for paying homage to famous old master’s paintings and celebrity portraits using unconventional materials such as sugar, chocolate syrup, dust, tomato sauce and diamonds to reproduce them. Muniz photographs those original and groundbreaking pieces, ultimately destroying them to ensure the photograph becomes the piece itself. Currently represented by Galeria Nara Roesler in New York and Brazil, his work enjoys critical and commercial success being exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the world.

Transformation is one of the cornerstones of Muniz’s work, frequently employing garbage to compose his images. In Pictures of Garbage, Muniz drew inspiration from the lives of trash pickers – so-called ‘catadores’ – working in one of the world’s largest garbage dumps located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Using refuse collected by those workers, he crafted images of them, weaving in recognizable themes from throughout art history. Muniz’s work was featured in the documentary film Waste Land, directed by Lucy Walker and nominated to the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2010. As stated by the artist in the documentary, ‘what I want to be able to do is to change the lives of people with the same materials they deal with every day’.