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7/9/2007

Francis Alys

Villa Grisebach Gallery, Berlin

Works from private collections

Villa Grisebach Gallery will kick off the fall season with an exceptional exhibition: "Francis Alÿs: Works from private collections“. Thanks to the generous support of a number of private collectors the Gallery will be able to present a dynamic overview of the work of the Belgian-born artist from the late 1980s until today. Reflecting the artist’s multidisciplinary process, the exhibition will include his drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures and installations, among them the 80-part slide projection Ambulantes.

Francis Alÿs (b. 1959) is regarded as one of the most important contemporary artists of the younger generation. Trained as an architect, Alÿs came to Mexico in 1986 in the wake of a devastating earthquake to help rebuild. Shortly after, Alÿs moved to Mexico City where he has been living and working since. Fascinated by the anatgonisms and warpings of every day life in the megalopolis, Alÿs’s work emerged as a practice that centers around the clash of modernism and premodernism, the First with the Third Worlds as well as the juxtapositions between the individual, the city and society.

His extended walks through the urban surroundings gave Alÿs inspiration for small noticed and unnoticed interventions in the structure of every day life. For instance, the magnetic core of the sculpture The Collector that Alÿs pulled on a string behind him would assemble any metallic residue from the streets as the recording of a walk. In Fairy Tales Alÿs wears a cardigan that unravels in a strand of yarn, leaving a trace in the urban structure. Behind these projects stand references to Baudelaire’s Flaneur as well as to the Situationist strategy of the Dérive, and not least the performative actions of Vito Acconci. In addition, the exhibition will feature paintings from the Sign Painting Project that was honored in 2006 in Basle in a major exhibition. For this project Alÿs presented local sign painters (rotulista) with his small, almost surrealist paintings, asking them to produce a copy that he would in turn have copied by another rotulista or by himself. With the formal and stylistic changes appearing in the process, Alÿs highlights the concepts of authenticity, individuality and the functioning of the art market.

Francis Alÿs’s multifaceted oeuvre was last exhibited in Berlin on the occasion of the granting of the blueOrange prize in 2004. In 2002 Kunst-Werke showed a project by the artist. Major monographic exhibtions took place in the last few years at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Portikus, Frankfurt, Schaulager, Basel, among others.

Opening reception: 8 September, 18.00 – 20.00

Villa Grisebach Gallery
Fasanenstr. 25 D-10719 Berlin
Opening hours: Tue - Fri 10 - 18, Sat 11 - 16

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