Francis Alÿs. Fabiola

Museo Amparo presents the exhibition Francis Alÿs. Fabiola through October 15, 2012. The show features more than 400 images of St. Fabiola collected by the Belgian-born, Mexico-based artist over more than a decade.

The selection of works, all of them hand-made reproductions based on the 1885 original by Academic painter Jean Jacques Henner, presents at first glance a disconcerting homogeneity. As Lynn Cooke, the curator, points out, this gives rise to historical and aesthetic questions associated to the Great masters in general, as to fundamental matters in art such as authorship, iconography, function, originality, and collecting, among others.

Although at first the works seem identical, differences between them quickly appear on closer examination. In general, they encompass a wide range with variations that go from the media used—oil painting, embroidery, varnish, and, in a particularly memorable instance, seeds and beans—to the dazzling diversity of technical skill.

The show Francis Alÿs. Fabiola has been commissioned by New York's Dia Art Foundation and curated by Lynne Cooke. Its itinerary throughout Latin America has been coordinated by Tatiana Cuevas with the support of the David Zwirner Gallery in New York.

Fabiola is the patron saint of nurses and battered women, and according to St. Jerome, who wrote Fabiola's first biography in the Fourth Century, she left a husband who mistreated her, remarried, and became a widow a few years later. Fabiola became a cult figure after the publication, in 1850, of a short novel based on St. Jerome's text.