Art Icon 2020
21 January 2020
Whitechapel Gallery is pleased to announce that Francis Alÿs (b. 1959, Belgium) will be the seventh artist to receive the prestigious Art Icon Award in partnership with Swarovski. Art Icon 2020 will be presented at a gala dinner at Whitechapel Gallery on Tuesday 21 January 2020.
Born in Antwerp in 1959, Alÿs originally trained as an architect and moved to Mexico City in 1968, where he continues to live and work. It was the confrontation with issues of urbanisation and social unrest in his new country of adoption that inspired his decision to become a visual artist. Throughout his practice, Alÿs consistently directs his distinct poetic and imaginative sensibility toward anthropological and geopolitical concerns centred around observations of, and engagements with, everyday life. His multifaceted projects including public actions, installations, video, paintings, and drawings have involved travelling the longest possible route between locations in Mexico and the United States; pushing a melting block of ice through city streets; commissioning sign painters to copy his paintings; filming his efforts to enter the centre of a tornado; and equipping hundreds of volunteers to move a colossal sand dune ten centimetres.
Notes to Editors
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