Architectural Digest just published this image of Vik Muniz with Mnemonic Vehicle #1 in his Brooklyn studio.
“What makes up the pictures inside your head? This is the question I’m always asking myself,” says artist Vik Muniz. Best known for assembling mundane materials into trompe l’oeil tableaux, which he then photographs, the Brazilian-born talent (shown above in his Brooklyn studio) is the subject of a retrospective opening this winter at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. In his inventive compositions, garbage, chocolate, and powdered pigment are arranged into facsimiles of famous paintings, while scraps of old snapshots are collaged into family portraits, and pictures of castles are improbably etched onto grains of sand. New sculptures reproduce toy cars—like those Muniz collected as a child—at full size. “I have no interest in what I haven’t seen,” he says. “You have to make images that are mysterious but still communicate ideas to everybody.” February 28–May 29; high.org