The Fortes Vilaça Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Trabalhos Monádicos e “Fotografias” [Monadic Works and “Photographs”] by Vik Muniz. The photographs and drawings, all of which are being shown here for the first time, use various themes to explore the relationship between the two artistic media.

In this exhibition Muniz has gathered together special works that do not have a direct relationship with his previous work. The name Monadic Works is a reference to Liebniz’s famous theory of monads. In the eighteenth century this German philosopher declared that the basic particles of the universe are all distinct units, alive and growing, with various levels of intelligence. One of the principal corrolaries of this theory is that matter is just an illusion.

Three photographs relate war to play, using icons from the American popular imagination – Toy Soldier, Old Cheyenne, and Horse. Toy Soldier – a 228 X 183cm photograph – shows a soldier made out of little plastic toy soldiers. Four thousand tiny toy soldiers were used to create this image, inspired by an anonymous daguerrotype from the nineteenth century.

In Largo de São Francisco [São Francisco Plaza], Muniz used a photograph by Militão      Augusto de Azevedo to help him construct a panorama of the city of São Paulo. Close up, the viewer can see that the image is made out of grains of coffee. Here the material used is related to the history of the city. In another photograph, a rose made entirely out of colored plastic insects also explores the illusory nature of appearances, the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm, beauty and strangeness, the visible and the invisible.

Drawing is always a part of Muniz’s work. He has previously used materials such as dust, chocolate, and wire to create his drawings. The final result of these drawings has always been a photograph. Here, for the first time, Muniz is showing drawings of photographs instead of photographs of drawings. For the artist this is a way to think about photography while simultaneously practicing the art of drawing, thereby exploring the incestuous relationship between the two media.

The photographs on which the drawings are based are part of a collection of more than ten thousand anonymous photographs bought by the artist in thrift stores. The drawings explore the domestic, everyday nature of photography through a detailed investigation of sub-genres such as portraits, travel pictures, or wedding pictures. There are situations that occur time and again in many photo albums: a child in front of a Christmas tree; a picture of the dog; a tourist lying on the beach; a photo of the camel seen on a trip to Egypt.

“I almost always mix details from various photographs into a single drawing, while thinking about the stories behind the images. The drawings transform the specific content of the photographs, lost when they became anonymous, into symbolic images.”

In parallell to the show at Fortes Vilaça, Vik Muniz opens on August 14th  the exhibition Pictures of Magazine at Paço Imperial do Rio de Janeiro. The artist creates a pantheon  of Brazilian personalities  that includes president Lula,  Pelé, carnival master Joãozinho Trinta and writer João Ubaldo Ribeiro, amongst others. Pictures of Magazine will be exhibited at MACRO, Rome, on September 2003 and at Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, on January 2004. Fothcoming exhibitions also include Centro Galego de Arte Contemporânea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (December 2003) and Irish MOMA, Dublin, Ireland (January 2004).