ART-PRESENTATION: Felix Gonzalez-Torres

A three-part exhibition of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres opens in May. Curated by artists Julie Ault and Roni Horn, each exhibition will focus on the dialogue between works within an essential form that Gonzalez-Torres created. In so doing, the Curators hope to underline the specificity and magnitude within particular bodies of the artist’s work.

By Efi Michalarou

By engaging the range of decisions brought to bear in manifesting and installing selected Gonzalez-Torres works that require being made anew, the Curators underscore vital methods reflected throughout the artist’s entire oeuvre. The exhibitions are conceived as individual experiences that should be understood in the larger context of all three. Each exhibition is intended to complement and augment the experiences they offer within the larger whole and within Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s practice. Born in Cuba, the artist moved to New York in 1979 and trained as a photographer, though he would go on to work in a variety of media, including sculpture and installation. In 1989 Gonzalez-Torres began making his “Stack pieces”, blocklike stacks of paper printed with content related to his private life, from which the viewer is invited to take a sheet. Rather than constituting a solid, immovable monument, the stacks can be dispersed, depleted, and renewed over time. As the artist stated, “Without the public these works are nothing. I need the public to complete the work. I ask the public to help me, to take responsibility, to become part of my work, to join in”.  Relinquishing his work, however, was always a bittersweet undertaking for the artist, as it was tied emotionally to loss of his long-term partner, Ross Laycock, to AIDS in 1991. “I wanted to make an artwork that could disappear”, Gonzalez-Torres related, “that never existed, and it was a metaphor for when Ross was dying. So it was a metaphor that I would abandon this work before it would abandon me”. Around the time of Ross’s death, Gonzalez-Torres made his first lightstring piece (two intertwined lightbulbs on cords dangling from a nail on the wall) as a meditation on lifelong partners and perfect, endless love. In “Untitled (North)” (1993), we see strands of light suspended from the ceiling, some gently resting on the ground, each one representing a human being that at any course of the installation’s duration might be extinguished. While the strands act as reminders of our interconnectedness as humans, the light bulbs also represent the inevitability of death. The artist’s “Candy spills”, piles of candies heaped in a corner from which visitors are welcome to help themselves, are likewise celebrations of generosity and love. Piled usually in the corners of galleries or spread across a gallery floor-again. Gonzalez-Torres chose evocative weights, specifying that one such sculpture have a weight of 80 kg to represent the ideal weight of the average male while also referring to the weight loss and eventual death of Ross Laycock. His work “Untitled (Perfect Lovers)” consists of two identical clocks synchronised to mark the same time, but by doing so reiterating the fact that these two clocks will eventually fall out of sync, going in different directions. Even in our most perfect unions, it will be impossible to avoid the simple yet undeniable force of time. All of Gonzalez-Torres’s work share this enduring hope in the face of loss and impermanence. There is a deep sense of connectedness to others and to the world, as well as an acknowledgment of the faith, trust, and vulnerability that accompany opening ourselves up to something or someone else.

Info: Curators: Julie Ault and Roni Horn, Andrea Rosen Gallery, 525 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 3/5-18/6/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.andrearosengallery.com, Massimo De Carlo, Via Privata Giovanni Ventura 5, Milan, Duration: 20/5-20/7/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:30-19:00, http://massimodecarlo.com, Hauser & Wirth, 23 Savile Row, London, Duration: 27/5-30/7/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com