Francis Alÿs

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Francis Alÿs (b. 1959, Antwerp, Belgium) is an artist that lives and works in Mexico City. He is represented by David Zwirner gallery in New York City.

Contents

[edit] Work

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Francis Alÿs was born in Antwerp in 1959. He attended the Institute of Architecture in Tournai and the Istituto di Archiettura in Venice before moving to Mexico City in 1986. His work encompasses many media often involving the participation and presence of the artist. These performed events are documented in video, photographs, writing, and animation.

In his best-known work, When Faith Moves Mountains 2002, Alÿs recruited 500 volunteers outside of Lima, Peru[1]. Each person moved a shovel full of sand one step at a time from one side of a dune to the other, and together they moved the entire geographical location of the dune by a few inches. This gesture is a poetic one, the actual moving of the dune amounted to nothing, the significance of the work is in its suggestion. Art critic Jean Fisher writes that “the radical event of art precipitates a crisis of meaning or, rather, it exposes the void of meaning at the core of a given social situation, which is its truth .[2]”

[edit] Exhibitions

Alÿs' work has been shown in many international institutions, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles(2007), Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany, MALBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2006); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany; Musée d'Art Contemporain, Avignon, France (2004); Centro nazionale per le arti contemporanee, Rome, Italy [traveled to Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain] (all 2003); and Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2002).

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains, Event, 2002, Lima.
  2. ^ Alÿs, et al., Francis Alÿs, 116.