Acquisitions
Francis Alÿs - Untitled
2023
With his socially critical works, Francis Alÿs exposes the contradictions and absurdities of our everyday lives. Born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1959, Alÿs has developed a body of work that is deeply rooted in politics while also unfolding a poetic dimension. His art often takes the form of subtly staged actions and performative gestures, through which he makes complex social realities and unequal power relations tangible. The contradictions of political and cultural regimes become just as tangible as those of his own aesthetic productions, which Alÿs formulates and presents in an exaggerated manner.
His work Untitled was created as part of The Sign Painting Project (1993–1997). In this four-year series, Alÿs painted a recurring figure of a man in a suit on small-format canvases in the style of the enamel billboards (“Rótulos”) created by sign painters in Mexico City. At the time the series was created, the rotulistas were a defining feature of urban life in Mexico. At the same time, he had the sign painters Juan García, Emilio Rivera, and Enrique Huerta produce copies, enlargements, and their own interpretations of the motifs on enamel panels, to which he in turn responded with his own painterly variations. He compared the creative process to the children’s game Chinese whispers, in which the original message changes and transforms over the course of the game. Alÿs was thus responding to his discomfort with art-immanent values such as originality and the common value chains of the art world.