Recollections Oscar Muñoz
August 27 – December 10, 2022
Opening reception: Thursday, September 1, 5:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Opening Reception
Co-curated by Vanessa K. Davidson, Curator of Latin American Art, The Blanton Museum
of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, and Cynthia Nourse Thompson, Director of
Curatorial Affairs, Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art
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.
Credit: Oscar Muñoz, Ambulatorio (Walking Place/Outpatient Ward), 1994-2008, Photographs encapsulated in shattered tempered security glass. Courtesy
of the artist and Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino Art Gallery, Houston, TX © Otto Saxinger,
Ok Centrum
