(back to top)

This photograph belongs to Vik Muniz's series Pictures of Chocolate, in which the artist recreates famous photographs with Bosco chocolate syrup. Action Painter II (after Rudy Burckhardt) replicates an image of the "action painter" Jackson Pollock, painting a canvas on his studio floor.

Muniz is interested in the relationship between subject and material in a work of art. The syrup recalls the commercial house paint that Pollock famously dripped and splattered onto his canvasses. Action Painter II (after Rudy Burckhardt) is a multi-sensory experience-it conjures the taste and tactility of syrup. Muniz takes one concept through many cycles of material translation-from mythic persona to documentary photograph to drawing-until his final photograph coalesces the process in one static image.

Muniz's portraits of movie stars and images of war are recognizable even when drawn out of sugar or fake blood. His work shows that widely circulated images may become socially ingrained signs, recognizable even when reduced to their most basic forms.