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MU?IZipal Art
PinchukArtCentre hosts an Exhibition titled "A Survey" presenting a Grandee of contemporary art, Brazilian Vik Muñiz. This is exactly a rare occurrence for Ukraine when it can welcome art-stars of the first magnitude.
Unfortunately, Ukrainian art connoisseurs know little about the world's trends within contemporary art. For them, any work produced by a photographer depicting a portrait of Mayakovskiy, laid with black caviar, is a wonderful overture of a sophisticated symphony defined as "contemporary art".
Portraits of movie stars made of diamonds - Catherine Deneuve, Romy Schneider, and Sophia Loren. Replica of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa made of jelly. Gorgon made of ketchup and spaghetti. A toy soldier made of toy soldiers. Or an absolutely amazing huge diptych titled" "Atlanta and Hippomenes", made of made of huge piles of junk from Rio de Janeiro. Muñiz created it in his enormous studio to destroy it right after taking a picture of it. This is a technique of the artist who was recognized in mid 90s after he produced series of portraits made sugar depicting poor Caribbean children. Cotton wool, dust, pins and threads, chocolate and mustard - anything that can interpret this or that image in Vik Muñiz's head, becomes a picture first, and then it becomes a photograph.
Born to a poor Brazilian family, Vik Muñiz is now a resident of New York and a national pride. In 2001, he was afforded the honour of representing Brazil at the 49th Venice Biennale. His amazing and, at the same time, warm ironic works were showcased in major world museums of contemporary art - New York Moma and Tate London Gallery. In order to keep pace within this sphere, PinchukArtCentre invited for cooperation an art director, Claire Stebler - curator of Contemporary Art Centre in Paris. The exhibition of Muñiz's works with the participation of a well-known Ukrainian art-critic, Alexander Solovyev has become her first project. The goal of this project not only to sketchy acquaint Ukrainians with world brands though 50 works, but also to become the first robin on the way towards extensive educational program, being beyond narrow-gauge local art underground.
As for Muñiz, he was equally accepted by professionals and amateurs, by former president Leonid Kuchma, by Vitaly Klitchko, and by street live performers, band "Foam Plastic". He is truly an artist whom everybody likes without using some extra captations. Vik Muñiz openly said that the most important task of his work during the last 20 years was aimed at expanding borders of contemporary photography and painting. In addition, the most crucial thing consists in offering viewer a new key to understanding art. Vik Muñiz: "While digital media are getting more flexible and more revealing, our ability to "consume" an image develops within almost the same proportion to our disability to understand it. While visual literacy is still considered to be something that comes from Victorian times, and our schools has no equipment to launch relevant programs and teach people how to recognize and understand visual messages, the role of an artist who can plant seeds of a new trend is getting even more important ".
