Focusing on Hitchcock’s regular, and famed, cameo appearances in each of his films, Looking for Alfred foregrounds these walk-on parts with the aid of Hitchcock look-alikes.

Over a few months the artist’s quest was to find the perfect 'doppelganger' and in the exhibition the film is counter-pointed with behind-the-scenes footage of the production, including screen tests held in New York, Los Angeles and London. This quest culminated with the filming of a gathering of several Hitchcock impersonators in Brussels, Belgium.

Filmed in the atmospheric interiors of the Palais des Beaux-Arts, a seminal art deco building designed by Victor Horta, the setting creates a suitably beguiling and uncanny mise-en-scène. This choice of background, along with the recurring motif of the man in a suit wearing a bowler hat, brings to mind another great modern auteur - the surrealist artist René Magritte. Alfred Hitchcock was a great admirer of the surrealist movement, particularly their films, and in 1945 brought the work of the artist Salvador Dalí to Hollywood when he was asked to design a surreal dream sequence for Spellbound.

As in his previous work, Grimonprez weaves this complex web of references into a witty and multi-layered visual collage, full of cinematic twists and turns and will echo the style of the supreme Master of Suspense.

Johan Grimonprez was born in 1962 in Roeselaer, Belgium. He currently lives and works in Brussels and New York, teaching at the School of Visual Arts. He has had solo exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. His work has also been featured in a number of international group exhibitions including the touring group show Trauma (2002) that was exhibited at MOMA Oxford, amongst other venues, and in
The Galleries Show (2002) at The Royal Academy of Arts, London.