The Metropolitan Museum of Art will stage the first major New York survey of Felix Gonzalez-Torres's work since 1995, opening in summer 2027.
“Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Spaces Between,” on view June 10th through October 18th, 2027, will present more than 40 works by the Cuban-born American visual artist encompassing installation, painting, photography, sculpture, and video, drawn from public and private collections.
Included in the exhibition will be defining works such as, "Untitled" (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1991) which consists of an empty blue platform ringed with 48 lightbulbs that is briefly activated once per day by a lamé-clad go-go dancer; "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers) (1987–1990), twin battery-powered clocks which are initially set to the same time and slowly desynchronize; and "Untitled" (Revenge) (1991) a continuously replenished pile of blue candies in clear wrappers.
Rather than a conventional monographic show, the exhibition will place works within the Museum’s permanent collection galleries, ranging from Egyptian art and medieval art to historic British interiors.
“Felix Gonzalez-Torres is one of the most important artists of the 20th century. His installations transform ephemeral materials into enduring experiences that grapple with ideas such as time, loss, and love,” said Max Hollein, the Met's director and CEO. “For the first presentation of the artist in New York City in over three decades, the Met will showcase his art throughout the museum, in conversation with 5,000 years of human creativity.”
Untitled, 1994
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Carolina Nitsch Contemporary Art
The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago, which will mount a simultaneous, distinct exhibition, “This Work Cannot Be Destroyed.”
David Breslin, curator of modern and contemporary Art, who organized the show with curator Ann Goldstein, described Gonzalez-Torres's work as inseparable from the crisis that shaped it. “The AIDS crisis was the crucible that forged his resolute conceptual clarity, and his brilliance was creating an open-ended body of work where new meanings can be embedded into historical ones,” Breslin said.
Goldstein, who is now interim director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, co-organized the artist's first major survey in 1994. Three decades after his death, she remarked that the work remains “simultaneously deceptively beautiful and rigorously acute, defiantly romantic and precisely analytical—and uncannily present.” The exhibition's title is drawn from a 1994 fax Gonzalez-Torres sent his friend and gallerist Andrea Rosen, quoting the poet Elizabeth Bishop, “I watched closely the spaces between the birds.”
Born in Guáimaro, Cuba, in 1957, Gonzalez-Torres left the country as a child, living briefly in Spain and then Puerto Rico before settling in New York in 1979. He attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and earned his BFA from the Pratt Institute, and from 1987 to 1994 was a member of Group Material, the politically engaged artists' collective co-founded by Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, and Tim Rollins. His best-known works invite viewers to physically deplete them, taking a candy from a seemingly endless pile, or a sheet from a towering stack of paper, turning gallerygoers into collaborators in works about circulation, loss, and the boundary between public and private life. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1996, at 38.
Interest in Gonzalez-Torres’s work has surged this year. A large survey at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, “Dulce Venganza” (“Sweet Revenge”), co-curated by Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, gathers more than 50 works through October 12th and has drawn attention for how directly the artist’s warnings about “encroaching conservative forces in government,” as Spector has put it, resonate today.
In February, the Fundación Fernando Romero staged an exhibition at Mexico City's La Cuadra San Cristóbal, the Luis Barragán–designed house, pairing Gonzalez-Torres’s beaded curtains, mirrors, and light strings with Barragán’s architecture in what curators called “a poetic dialogue” between two artists who never met.
Gonzalez-Torres himself pointed to art's transformative power in his own writing. Describing a visit to see Roni Horn’s Gold Field (1982) with his partner, Ross Laycock, as Laycock was dying of AIDS-related illness, he wrote that the work was “a new landscape, a possible horizon, a place of rest and absolute beauty.”
An accompanying catalogue will include newly commissioned texts by Breslin, Goldstein, Paulina Pobocha of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Samuel Shapiro of the Met.
Gonzalez-Torres described his intentions simply, “Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that's why I made works of art.”
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/MRcd2PX
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