Vik Muniz, “Verso”

Verso (Starry Night)

Vik Muniz’s first new sculptures in many years portray the reverse sides, or versos, of famous paintings in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Art Institute of Chicago. They might be the least sexy backsides in all of art history (not counting John Coplans’s); they’re certainly among the most painstaking.

Made from photographs taken between 2002 and 2006 with the blessing of curators and conservators, Muniz’s trompe l’oeil objects replicate in exacting life-size detail the wall’s-eye view of masterpieces such as Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and Grant Wood’s American Gothic—yellowing canvas, scratched wooden stretchers, torn labels and all.The sculptures’ high production value and convincing detail are seductive, but amount to little more than an unnecessarily extravagant tutorial on the conventions of museum stewardship. The photos Muniz took—not on view here—deliver virtually the same information minus the totemic appeal. It’s certainly a conventional turn for this virtuoso draftsman, who teases weird materials into recognizable images, which he then photographs. These sculptures suggest mimicry without his usual visual alchemy: the hinges on Verso (Starry Night) are, after all, just hinges.

But Muniz’s stand-ins do offer a trace of art-historical romance. Verso (Woman Ironing), based on the Guggenheim’s 1904 Picasso icon, bears an old owner’s stamp, the museum’s handwritten acquisition number and a smattering of traveling-exhibition stickers like on an old steamer trunk. It makes you wonder what the back of Muniz’s work will look like a century from now.