Oscar MÅ«noz: Recollections

From the venue:

Recollections features six seminal works by Colombian artist Oscar Muñoz. The Zuckerman Museum of Art is pleased to host these works which were featured in the artist’s first retrospective in the United States, Invisibilia, curated by Vanessa K. Davidson of the Blanton Museum of Art. Oscar Muñoz is one of the most innovative artists working in Latin America today. Best known for his evocative use of ephemeral materials to interrogate the stability of the photographic image, Muñoz poetically equates its intrinsic fragility with the fallibility of memory and the precariousness of life itself. Although his radical artistic practice combines photographic processes with drawing, painting, printmaking, installation, and video, the artist does not consider himself a photographer. In opposition to Roland Barthes’s belief that photography is definitive and absolute, Muñoz’s works defy fixation, thus calling into question memory, erasure, permanence, and the resolute. Davidson thoughtfully reflects, “Muñoz’s works exist between forgetting and remembering, in other words, there is a constant battle between a thing that materializes and then fades away, falls apart. Although the images Muñoz creates often change or disappear, they stay transfixed in our minds.” Deeply rooted in the Colombian context, Muñoz’s artworks nevertheless have universal resonance. This exhibition is co-curated by Vanessa K. Davidson and Cynthia Nourse Thompson.