The New Britain Museum of American Art dedicates a major mid-career retrospective to Vik Muniz. Presenting more than twenty-five years of Muniz’s work, it brings together his iconic series where the artist uses a dizzying array of unconventional materials — including sugar, tomato sauce, diamonds, magazine clippings, chocolate syrup, dust, and junk — as well as reproductions of iconic images from popular culture and art history.
Drawing on our sense of collective memory while defying easy classification, the artist questions a viewer’s process of perception.
His more recent work incorporates electron microscopes and manipulates microorganisms to explore issues of scale while unveiling both the familiar and the strange in spaces that are typically inaccessible to the human eye.