ART CITIES:N.York-Felix Gonzalez Torres

Felix Gonzalez-Torres is one of the most significant artists to emerge in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Employing simple, everyday materials (stacks of paper, puzzles, candy, strings of lights, beads) and a reduced aesthetic vocabulary reminiscent of both Minimalism and Conceptual Art to address themes such as love and loss, sickness and rejuvenation, gender and sexuality, González-Torres asked viewers to participate in establishing meaning in his works.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ influential work is for the first time on presentation at David Zwirner Gallery in New York, on the occasion of the recent announcement that David Zwirner and Andrea Rosen Gallery will co-represent the Estate of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The exhibition spans several bodies of work from throughout the artist’s career, presented in a series of distinct installations in nine spaces of the Gallery. the Installations together, in their radical openness to interventions of site, audience, and context, the works on view challenge perceived notions of what constitutes an exhibition space, a public, an artwork itself. Gonzalez-Torres’s work addresses issues of identity, desire, originality, loss, the metaphor of journey, and the private versus the public domain. Like many artists of the ‘80s, Gonzalez-Torres used the strategy of appropriating ready-made motifs and objects. The artist said about his influences: “I think more than anything else I’m just an extension of certain practices, minimalism or Conceptualism, that I am developing areas I think were not totally dealt with. I don’t like this idea of having to undermine your ancestors, of ridiculing them, undermining them, and making less out of them. I think we’re part of a historical process and I think that this attitude that you have to murder your father in order to start something new is bullshit. We are part of this culture, we don’t come from outer space, so whatever I do is already something that has entered my brain from some other sources and is then synthesized into something new. I respect my elders and I learn from them. There’s nothing wrong with accepting that. I’m secure enough to accept those influences. I don’t have anxiety about originality, I really don’t.” Throughout his career, Gonzalez-Torres’s involvement in social and political causes as an openly gay man fueled his interest in the overlap of private and public life. From 1987 to 1991, he was part of Group Material, a New York-based art collective whose members worked collaboratively to initiate community education and cultural activism. In his “dateline” works, begun in 1987, Gonzalez-Torres assembled lists of various dates in random order interspersed with the names of social and political figures and references to cultural artifacts or world events, many of which related to political and cultural history. Printed in white type on black sheets of paper, these lists of seeming non sequiturs prompted viewers to consider the relationships and gaps between the diverse references as well the construction of individual and collective identities and memories. Beginning in 1989, he fashioned sculptures of stacks of paper, often printed with photographs or texts, and encouraged viewers to take the sheets. The impermanence of these works, which slowly disappear over time unless they are replenished, symbolizes the fragility of life. In 1991 Gonzalez-Torres began producing sculptures consisting of strands of plastic beads strung on metal rods, like curtains in a disco. Titles such as “Untitled (Chemo)” (1991) and “Untitled (Blood)” (1992) undercut their festive associations, calling to mind illness and disease. In 1992 he commenced a series of strands of white low-watt lightbulbs, which could be shown in any configuration, strung along walls, from ceilings, or coiled on the floor. Also in “Untitled” (1991), a black-and-white photograph of Gonzalez-Torres’s empty, unmade bed with traces of two absent bodies, was installed on 24 billboards throughout the New York City. This enigmatic image was both a celebration of coupling and a memorial to the artist’s lover, who had recently died of AIDS. Its installation as a melancholic civic-scaled monument problematized public scrutiny of private behavior.

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 537 West 20th Street, New York, Duration: 17/4-24/6/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com