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25/5/2008

Francis Alys

Goetz Collection, Munich

The Goetz Collection is putting on a wide-ranging exhibition of more than 20 works by Antwerp-born Belgian artist Francis Alÿs. Photographs, collages, paintings, drawings, audio, slides, video installations and sculptures provide an overview of Alÿs’ rich output between 1991 and 2006. In 2001, his video installation Cuentos Patrióticos (1997) was one of the works shown at the opening of the new film room BASE 103. Now the artist has developed an exhibition that embraces all the works out of the Collection.

In his works, Alÿs tells little stories that are humorous and yet also melancholy in character. Without being morally enlightening, he manages to subtly prompt the viewers to take a close look. His subject matter is often everyday life in the streets, focusing on urban actuality in his chosen homeland of Mexico. He first established an international reputation with Paseos (Walks). Using these walks as a basis, he created a diverse oeuvre that sensitively explores social, political, and historical conditions in his chosen homeland with delicate humor while always retaining a general, profoundly human dimension. In his drawings, Alÿs often lays bare the processual nature of his works, thereby drawing viewers in as accomplices. The dialogue with viewers is one of the artist’s main focuses in his works, as in this exhibition.

Starting in the entrance area, the artist has chosen to show his nine-part video installation Choques (2005-2006) throughout the whole museum. The videos show a collision between a dog and a man from various angles. The placing of the monitors is such that the work guides visitors from one monitor to the next, eventually taking them round the whole exhibition.

Untitled (1996) practices a prank on visitors. It consists of two small-format paintings that are exact copies of each other. They show the legs of a man walking behind a cat on the sidewalk. Installed in two different places in the museum, they give visitors a sense of déjà vu, as the artist intended. The pictures come from a series of the same title dated 1996 – 2002 and comprise a total of fifteen pairs of pictures.

Many of the other works exhibited were produced in the historic environment of Zócalo, the main square in Mexico City. Among them is Cuentos Patrióticos. In the video, the artist goes round and round the flagpole in the Zócalo with a sheep trotting after him on a lead. With each circuit, a new sheep joins them until they make a complete circle. The origin of this absurd-seeming action was a historical event. During the civil unrest of 1968, thousands of civil servants were summoned to the Zócalo to show vocal support for the government, but in an act of defiance they turned their backs on the official platform and began to bleat like a huge herd of sheep.

From 1992 to 2001, Alÿs documented people and animals in the streets of Mexico City. In the slide show Ambulantes (1992-2001) that can be translated with “people walking around” or “itinerants”, Alÿs photographed people carrying or pulling a wide range of things such as boxes, plants, barrels, balloons, and many other things along otherwise empty streets. Although the act of lugging such outsize objects along requires immense exertion, the pictures radiate calmness and composure. With the poorest city dwellers in the country improvising like this, Alÿs shows the underside of a globally networking economy and society. They are more than just proof of poverty in the huge metropolis. Like Sleepers III (2003) and Beggars (2003-2004), the slides document the private use of the streets and appropriation of public space.

Collector Ingvild Goetz describes the artist thus: “Francis Alÿs has a sharp eye for how people cope with problems and have pleasure in small things, even though their lives aren’t easy. He shows us the defeats and triumphs of ordinary life without mockery or cynicism, in fact more with the melancholy of a clown. What interests him is the perception and decoding of what we often fail to notice, and how even ordinary things acquire a battery of associations.”

Francis Alÿs initially studied architecture in Tournai (Belgium), graduating at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura in Venice. He has lived in Mexico City since 1986, and had his first solo exhibition there in 1990. He is now considered one of the most important artists in the country. From the mid-1990s, he was recognized internationally. The importance of his work is impressively borne out by the recognition accorded to him in countless international exhibitions in museums and galleries and the participation in biennales.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue (in German/English), with an introduction by Ingvild Goetz, and contributions by Magali Arriola, Karsten Löckemann, Stephan Urbaschek and Katharina Vossenkuhl, who also drew up the exhibition list.

Goetz Collection
Oberfoehringerstrasse 103 - Munich

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