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Lunar Invasion

Francisco Sierra - Lunar Invasion
An overview of the wide-ranging oeuvre of paintings and sculptures by the Chilean-born Swiss-based artist. The numerous reproductions, organized according to a chromatic progression, are accompanied by an interview with the artist.
Francisco Sierra worked on a single painting for nine months. It's about 1.5 m high and 2.5 m wide. It shows three jumbo jets under construction. He spent day after day, from early morning till late at night, standing, sitting or crouching before the canvas. Which testifies to the artist's patience and perseverance—and how much he believes in his subject. But Sierra also does small and medium-sized paintings. And triptychs. As well as subjects other than jumbos, like magnificent sunsets, delicate tea sets and hypnotic Möbius strips, for example. He paints penis-shaped Christmas trees hung with ornaments. Avocados kissing. Ambiguously steaming piles of excrement. And his formal training as a violinist reverberates in his pictures time and again. Some of his subjects are fantastical, some mundane— though that seemingly mundane content is what makes these pictures peculiarly uncanny. Francisco Sierra addresses the question of what form contemporary figurative painting might take. He faithfully and precisely paints things, reality, but the subjects he picks seldom represent what they seem to at first glance. Sierra is interested in the transformation of apparent clarity into something new and mysterious. He explores the pitfalls of contemporary photographic reproduction and the transformative potential of painting, which involves surrealist and conceptual approaches. Besides their masterful technical proficiency, what Sierra's works have in common is humor—sometimes grotesque, sometimes in discreet doses, a mere trace element, homeopathic. Lunar Invasion now provides an overview of the wide-ranging oeuvre of paintings and sculptures by this Chilean-born Swiss-based artist.
— Max Küng
Francisco Sierra (born 1977 in Santiago de Chile) emigrated to Switzerland in 1986. He is a trained violinist and self-taught visual artist. He is also a member of the performance collective Jetpack Bellerive and, since 2018, an artistic associate at the ETH Zurich.
Francisco Sierra's work considers the question of how contemporary figurative painting could look. He paints the reality of things faithfully, but his works' chosen subjects rarely represent that which they may first be taken for. He is interested in the transformation of apparent clarity into something new and enigmatic. Sierra is occupied by the pitfalls of contemporary photographic reproduction and the transformative potential of painting, involving surrealistic and conceptual approaches.
Text by Francisco Sierra and Max Küng.

Graphic design: Enjoy Stratford.
 
published in November 2021
bilingual edition (English / German)
24 x 30 cm (hardcover)
368 pages (164 ill.)
 
68.00
 
ISBN : 978-3-907236-34-5
EAN : 9783907236345
 
in stock


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