Francis Alÿs
Born in Antwerp, Belgium 1959. Lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico.
Mexico-based conceptual artist, he trained as an architect. He moved to Mexico City in 1986, where he continues to live and work, and it was the confrontation with issues of urbanization and social unrest in his new country of adoption that inspired his decision to become a visual artist. His multifaceted projects include public actions, installations, video, paintings, and drawings. His work has been recognized in solo exhibitions on several continents and in a traveling retrospective that opened at Tate Modern in London (“Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception”, 2010). Throughout his practice, Francis Alÿs consistently directs his distinct poetic and imaginative sensibility toward anthropological and geopolitical concerns centered on observations of, and engagements with, everyday life, which the artist himself has described as “a sort of discursive argument composed of episodes, metaphors, or parables.” After 2010, his work was presented in prominent exhibitions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (traveled to the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, 2013); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2006).