Art Review // Francis Alÿs
A look recent evolutions in Francis Alÿs’s interventions in the social and urban fabrics of cities, as he moves from Mexico City to a more international context
Known alternately as a poet of politics, a mawkish master of the absurd and a wonderful nut, Belgian-born Francis de Smedt arrived in Mexico in 1986 as an architect to work for nongovernmental organisations just after the earthquake of 1985, a disaster that left angry scars of political ruin and urban rubble in Mexico City for decades. Since making the transition from architect to artist at the end of the 1980s and adopting the nom de plume Alÿs along the way, he has developed an action-based practice in which featherweight provocation, documentation and political gesture intermingle through the emulsifying magic of humour, beauty and a reverence for the preposterous.
Image credit: Francis Alÿs 1994, Turista, photographic documentation of an action. Courtesy of David Zwirner New York & London
