Vik Muniz and Marcel van Eeden
Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea (CGAC)
Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
+34 981 564 632
cgac.prensa@xunta.es
www.cgac.org
CGAC (Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea. www.cgac.org) is pleased to announce the forthcoming solo shows of Brazilian artist Vik Muniz and Dutch artist Marcel van Eeden. The opening will take place at its premises in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, on Thursday December 18th, 2003.
Save the date. December 18th,2003, 8 p. m.
image: Vik Muniz: Edson (Pele), 2003, From the Series Pictures of Magazines, Chromogenic Print, 254 x 182.9 cm
Vik Muniz (Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1961) works as a craftsman in his workshop with different materials, such as chocolate, wire, sugar. He uses them to make up portraits and architectures; he reproduces well-known images and pieces done by other artists, which he eventually photographs. The result is never what it seems at first sight – he deceives the spectator’s eye and forces him/her to look again. Vik Muniz?s exhibition at CGAC, sponsored by Fundacion Telefonica, includes a very representative selection of pictures, grouped in series whose title generally refers to the material they are created with: Pictures of Wire; Pictures of Thread; The Sugar Children; Pictures of chocolate; Pictures of Dust; Pictures of Ink; Pictures of Color; Prisons; Pictures of Earthwork [The Sarzedo Drawings]; Pictures of Clouds; Pictures of Magazines; Erotica (Pictures of Silly Putty); Pillows (After Durer); Monads and Miscellaneous (non serial works). Within the Series: Images of chocolate we find some works which Muniz created from the Way of Santiago de Compostela, route that the artist covered during the Spring of 2003: Catedral de Burgos, Catedral de Leon and Catedral de Santiago de Compostela are works that Vik Muniz will present for the first time in the CGAC.
For his drawings, Marcel van Eeden (Den Haag, Holland, 1965) draws insouciantly on photographs and illustrations from old books and magazines, ranging from travel books and topographical atlases to books on art and periodicals like Life, De Wereldkroniek, Paris Match, De Spiegel and De Katholieke Illustratie. By meticulously copying these images, always beginning in the top left-hand corner of the paper and ending in the bottom right-hand corner, this avid bookworm makes them his own (through a process known in the language of postmodernism as appropriation). Almost as if he were a machine pre-programmed to draw, he churns out at least one drawing a day and preferably more. The key to understanding Van Eeden’s endless and apparently chaotic stream of images lies in the dating of his source materials: the illustrations he uses usually date from the period between the 1920s and 1965, the year in which he was born. Accordingly, the drawings can be viewed as nothing less than an obsessive attempt to reconstruct the period prior to his birth and hence to gain access to an era that he himself never witnessed. For this reason, they must be regarded as a single coherent body of work, an encyclopedic corpus embracing every aspect of life prior to 1965.
For further information please contact CGAC Press Department: ph.: +34 981 564 632 / cgac.prensa@xunta.es
