Born in 1959 in Antwerp (Belgium). He lives and works in Mexico City (Mexico).
Francis Alÿs’ work often takes the form of performative actions that he leads alone or that he conceives as major collective and collaborative events. He also develops a pictorial and drawn production that is not unrelated to the themes developed in the performances and that concerns the small repetitive and daily facts that shape our lives. If the performances often stage actions that are sometimes absurd and trying, sometimes lazy and whose final goal seems derisory, an important series of small paintings is interested in the question of sleep.
“Throughout his practice, Francis Alÿs directs his distinct poetic and imaginative sensibility towards anthropological and geopolitical concerns centered on observations and engagements with everyday life, which the artist himselfeven described as «a kind of discursive argument composed of episodes, metaphors or parables». His multifaceted projects, including public actions, installations, videos, paintings and drawings, have involved the longest possible journey between places in Mexico and the States-United; pushing a melting block of ice into the city streets; commissioning sign painters to copy his paintings; filming his efforts to enter the center of a tornado; carry a leaking pot of paint along the disputed border between Israel and Palestine; and equip hundreds of volunteers to move a colossal ten-centimeter sand dune.” , from the David Zwirner Gallery.