Francis Alys

The Belgian-born artist Francis Alÿs (born 1959) is known for his walks and tales executed in a wide range of media (documentary film, painting, photography, performance, video and installation) that marry humor and sensitivity, banality and spontaneity, personal and political. A compulsive wanderer, many of his works involve intense observation and recording of the social, cultural and economic conditions of urban life. This beautifully designed volume presents an ongoing series of paintings that function as kind of a storyboard and archive of the artist's oeuvre to date. Begun in 1996, Le Temps du Sommeil ("The Time of Sleep") comprises over 100 paintings accompanied by instructions and postcards related--sometimes obliquely--to the artist's past performative actions. The instructions and paintings are presented en face, giving birth to a text-image dialogue that is sometimes witty and always fascinating. Le Temps du Sommeil affirms Alÿs yet again as an artist always able to surprise.… (mais)

The Belgian-born conceptual painter and artistic interventionist Francis Alys developed The Sign Painting Project over a period of four years. He began by painting fairly small canvases depicting people and objects in the flat, brightly-colored manner of billboard advertisements. The artist, who currently lives in Mexico, then asked local sign-painters Juan Garcia, Enrique Huerta and Emilio Rivera to copy and enlarge his paintings. The result of the artists’ combined labors is a set of 120 paintings that reveal variations on particular themes and that inevitably provoke questions about collaboration, authorship and originality. This book is a catalogue raisonne of that project.… (mais)

This was a wide-ranging international group exhibition featuring the work of 17 artists from around the world, all of whom have used thread as a medium.
As well as being a medium, thread also becomes a metaphor for collapsing boundaries between painting and sculpture, word and image, computer-generated and handmade, masculine and feminine, high art and craft.

The show included performance, multimedia and internet projects, installations and two-dimensional works.

The exhibition continued the Serpentine Gallery’s commitment to bringing to the attention of the British public fresh perspectives through thematic group exhibitions. This was the first time the majority of the artists had exhibited in Britain.

Serpentine Gallery
22 Aug — 20 Sep 1998… (mais)