August 2 to December 31, 2004
National Academy of Sciences
2100 C St NW, Washington, D.C.
This exhibition juxtaposes Piranesi’s famed series Carceri d’Invenzione with photographs of Muniz’ intricate pin and thread re-creations of several of the 220-year-old prints.
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© Vik Muniz: Carceri XI, The Arch with
a Shell Ornament, after Piranesi
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GIOVANNI BATTISTA PIRANESI
An Italian etcher, archaeologist, designer, theorist, and architect, Piranesi's original designs, techniques, and ideas have influenced artists and writers both during and beyond his lifetime. Equipped with a talent for combining dramatic perspectives with architectural fantasies, and influenced by his early experience in stage design, Piranesi, at the age of twenty-nine, began work on the first edition of his Carceri series. By the time he was forty he had revisited the series and prepared a substantially-altered second edition.
The prints in this exhibition are from the third edition of the Carceri with one print from the first edition. The first edition print provides us with an opportunity to consider some of the dramatic changes that occurred as Piranesi re-worked the plates.
As the images evolved from edition to edition, the title for the series changed as well. Originally called Invenzioni Capric[ci] di Carceri or “imaginary inventions of prisons,” Piranesi changed the title to Carceri d’Invenzione, or “prisons of the imagination.” The new title allows for a more complex interpretation; that is, dramatic prisons invented by the imagination as an allegory for prisons that confine and hold the imagination.
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VIK MUNIZ
Brazilian born artist Vik Muniz often uses common but ephemeral materials such as dust, string, wire and chocolate to recreate well known images. For the works in this exhibition Muniz used pins and thread to meticulously recreate the etched lines of Piranesi's prisons.
By presenting installation photographs of his sculptural re-constructions, Muniz has removed us from the original objects created by Piranesi through a series of reproductions of reproductions. This is not done with the intention to mimic or even to improve upon the original, but to encourage the viewer to revisit and look harder at the original while pondering the process by which we embed meaning into such icons.
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