From the hours he spent drawing everything from geometric
solids to the nude in a traditional São Paolo art school, Vik Muniz retained a
respect for craft and technique even as he took his skills as a draftsman to decidedly
untraditional subjects and materials. Over the years, he has used photography
to transform wads of cotton into clouds with an uncanny resemblance to familiar
objects, spatters of chocolate syrup into Abstract Expressionist versions of
high-contrast pictures, and piles of garbage into icons of Old Master
paintings. Here, what at first appears to be a delicate line drawing reveals
itself, on closer inspection, to be a photograph of a wire sculpture—a clever
play of surface and illusion, reality and representation.