Author Description

For Vik Muniz, an artist who based in New York and Rio de Janeiro, the back of every painting is unique.Fascinated by the intimate, concealed and often cryptic way that history is reflected in paintings' backs, he produces perfect, three-dimensional copies of them.When he reproduces the most famous works from the history of art as objects he transforms them into installations and reveals how they were made; after all, what he is exhibiting is something to which audiences would otherwise never be privy.He himself says that 'When we see a picture hanging in a museum the intention is for us to be transported back to the time of its genesis and to forget the fact that since then a large period of time has elapsed and a great deal of human effort has been invested in preserving the work. In a manner of speaking, it is only these 'invisible hands' which complete the artist's striving for historical significance.The question of what there is on the back of a picture is very closely bound up with the question of exactly what art is and how the 'aura' of a work of art changes with each new context. Showing the back of the images turns the exhibition room inside out and invite the viewer to reconsider his attitude to museums and the things on show inside them.Two of the Belvedere's most important works, Gustav Klimt's The Kiss and Egon Schiele's The Embrace, form the subject of Vik Muniz' series Verso.English and German text.