Francis Alÿs, Sign Painting Project

Francis Alÿs, Theodora Vischer (Ed.)

Sign Painting Project

Steidl Publishers, Göttingen 2011
Hardcover, 200 pages with 300 color illustrations, 27 x 14,4 cm, English

With Juan García, Emilio Rivera, Enrique Huerta
Texts by Néstor García Canclini, Monika Kästli et al.

The Belgian-born conceptual painter and artistic interventionist Francis Alys developed The Sign Painting Project over a period of four years. He began by painting fairly small canvases depicting people and objects in the flat, brightly-colored manner of billboard advertisements. The artist, who currently lives in Mexico, then asked local sign-painters Juan Garcia, Enrique Huerta and Emilio Rivera to copy and enlarge his paintings. The result of the artists' combined labors is a set of 120 paintings that reveal variations on particular themes and that inevitably provoke questions about collaboration, authorship and originality.

This book, which features 300 color plates, is a catalogue raisonne of that project.