Ernesto Muñiz is a Mexican collage artist, born in 1974 in Mexico City. But his passion for the collage medium came later in life. He studied graphic design at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City but after graduation turned to photojournalism, working for a number of photographic agencies, newspapers, and magazines all over the world. He covered, for example, the Chiapas conflict and Zapatista uprising in 1994.
Muñiz turned to the collage medium following a personal crisis; he has found collage to be a more personal form of expression. The main, recurring themes of his pieces are religion, violence, love, and death. In his work, he reimagines religious iconography, combining it with Mexican imagery, nature-based imagery, occult symbolism, a variety of architectural forms, and wide-ranging cultural references, both old and new. He draws on artistic styles such as pop art, Baroque, and Surrealism.
His art has featured in galleries in the UK, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Mexico, and the US, but his artistic career began in the form of street art, pasting his collages (or “guerrilla shrines” as he calls them) in the streets of Mexico. These collages, through the mixture of religious iconography and violent themes, serve as means of social and political criticism. With his striking, detailed, and complex pieces, Muñiz has truly taken collage art to new heights.
