Ben Brown Fine Arts is delighted to announce Vik Muniz: Brushstrokes, the sixth solo exhibition of Muniz’s work at our London gallery. This new body of work continues the artist’s long-standing engagement with visual perception, materiality, and the mechanics of image-making. In Brushstrokes, Muniz turns his attention to the very building block of painting – the brushstroke itself – reassembling iconic images from the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist canon through meticulously layered photographic collages.
This series draws on the works of Vincent van Gogh, Joaquín Sorolla, Henri Matisse, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir – artists who radically reshaped the language of painting between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Impressionism and its aftermath broke with academic traditions by privileging perception over narrative, focusing instead on the fleeting effects of light, movement, and atmosphere. These painters did not describe the world through line and contour but evoked it through colour – applied in loose, visible, and expressive marks that summoned an image not through precision, but sensation.
