Francis Alÿs

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.