Vik Muniz
Sigmund

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Artist Vik Muniz (Brazilian, born 1961)Brazilian, born 1961

CultureAmerican

Titles

Sigmund
from the series Pictures of Chocolate

Date1997–98

PlaceUnited States

MediumSilver dye bleach print

Dimensionsimage: 38 1/2 × 30 3/4 inches (96.3 × 76.9 cm)
irregular sheet: 50 × 34 15/16 inches (125 × 87.3 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute in honor of C. Glenn Cambor

Object number99.294

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionSigmund is Vik Muniz's first color photograph. It depicts a portrait, made entirely of chocolate, of the renowned Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Muniz has made a number of works using ephemeral materials such as sugar, ink, chocolate, caviar, and even trash, which he uses to paint an image based on a pre-existing photograph by another photographer. Muniz then photographs each of his performative paintings before the materials can set. Muniz chose Sigmund as his first subject for a chocolate painting because he thought "Freud could explain all these associations [we have] with the medium [chocolate]," such as love, luxury, romance, obesity, and stains. Ultimately, Muniz is interested in the blurry relationship between various media as the seeming permanence of the source image is transformed by being recreated in another medium, and transformed again as it is re-visualized in photography.
Provenance[Brent Sikkema Fine Art, New York]; purchased by MFAH, 1999.
Exhibition HistoryExhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Lower Brown Corridor, "Contemporary Latin American Photography from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Collection", October 3, 2001 -January 27, 2002.

"Ruptures and Continuities: Photography Made after 1960 from the MFAH Collection," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Brown Foundation Galleries, February 21 - May 9, 2010.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

Inscription: The photograph is inscribed in black, verso, lower right: "Sigmund 1997 / #2/3".

The photograph is signed in black, verso, lower right: "Vik Muniz".

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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