| Felix Gonzalez-Torres | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1957 |
| Died | 1996 |
| Nationality | American |
| Field | Sculpture, Installation art |
Felix Gonzalez-Torres (November 26, 1957-January 9, 1996) was an American, Cuban-born visual artist.[Notes 1]
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González-Torres was born in Guáimaro, Cuba. In 1970, he and his sister were sent to Madrid, where they stayed in an orphanage until settling in Puerto Rico with relatives in 1971.[1] González-Torres graduated from the Colegio San Jorge in 1976 and began his art studies at the University of Puerto Rico, while actively participating in the local art scene.[2] He moved to New York City in 1979 with a study fellowship.[3] In 1983, he graduated with a BFA in photography from the Pratt Institute of Art, later going on to participate in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1981 and in 1983. In 1986, González-Torres traveled to Europe and studied in Venice. In 1987, he was awarded the degree of Master of Fine Arts by the International Center of Photography and New York University.[4] Subsequently he taught at New York University and briefly at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.[5]
González-Torres was known for his quiet, minimal installations and sculptures. Using materials such as strings of lightbulbs, clocks, stacks of paper, or packaged hard candies, his work is sometimes considered a reflection of his experience with AIDS. In 1987 he joined Group Material, a New York-based group of artists whose intention was to work collaboratively, adhering to principles of cultural activism and community education.[6] Along with the other members of the group — Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Karen Ramspacher, and Tim Rollins — González-Torres was invited by the MATRIX Gallery at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 1989 to deal with the subject of AIDS.[7]
González-Torres was considered within his time to be a process artist due to the nature of his 'removable' installations by which the process is a key feature to the installation. Many of his installations invite the viewer to take a piece of the work with them: a series of works allow viewers to take packaged candies from a pile in the corner of an exhibition space and, in so doing, contribute to the slow disappearance of the sculpture over the course of the exhibition.[8] In 1989 González-Torres presented Untitled (Memorial Day Weekend) and Untitled (Veterans Day Sale), exhibited together as Untitled (Monuments): block-like 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.[9] Untitled (1991), however, is a unique stack of 161 signed and numbered silkscreens that remain together. Similar to the 1989 billboard commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, its iteration as a stack of prints was meant, as the artist noted at the time, as a “more private and personal object”—one that is not disseminated physically but instead through the experience of remembering. The stark black page and white typeface on each sheet trace a nonlinear chronology of significant events in the history of the gay-rights movement.[10]
The most pervasive reading of González-Torres's work takes the processes his works undergo (lightbulbs expiring, piles of candies dispersing, etc.) as metaphor for the process of dying. However, many have seen the works also representing the continuation of life with the possibility of regeneration (replacing bulbs, replenishing stacks or candies). [11][12]
Other readings include the issue of public versus private, identity, and participation in contemporary art. One of his most recognizable works, Untitled (1991), was a billboard installed in twenty-four locations throughout New York City of a monochrome photograph of an unoccupied bed, made after the death of his long-time partner, Ross Laycock, from AIDS. Also, Untitled (Placebo) (1991), in one installation, consisted of a six-by-twelve-foot carpet of shiny silver wrapped candies.[13] Like other candy pieces in his oeuvre, the works have "ideal weights" which may fluctuate during the course of an exhibition. A borrower may choose to install the work at a weight different than the "ideal weight". The candy pieces may also be installed in any formation the borrower desires.[14]
In 1990 during Roni Horn’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, González-Torres encountered her sculpture Forms from the Gold Field (1980–82), two pounds of pure gold compressed into a luminous rectangular mat. When he met Horn in 1993, he created "Untitled" (Placebo – Landscape – for Roni) (1993), an endlessly replaceable candy spill of gold cellophane–wrapped sweets.[15] In 1992 González-Torres was granted a DAAD fellowship to work in Berlin, and in 1993 a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
All of González-Torres' works, with few exceptions, are entitled "Untitled" in quotation marks, sometimes followed by parenthetical title. (This was an intentional titling scheme by the artist).[16][17]
In one interview, he said "When people ask me, 'Who is your public?' I say honestly, without skipping a beat, 'Ross.' The public was Ross. The rest of the people just come to the work."[18]
González-Torres died in Miami in 1996 due to AIDS related complications.
González-Torres had a one-man exhibition of his early text pieces in 1988 at the Rastovski Gallery (560 Broadway) in Soho. In the same year, he also had solo exhibitions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and INTAR Gallery in New York.[19] In 1989, he exhibited a billboard in Sheridan Square, New York City, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion.
His work continues to be exhibited internationally at galleries and museums. Retrospectives of his work have been organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1995), which traveled to the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany (1997); the Serpentine Gallery in London (2000); the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City (2010); Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art in Middlesbrough; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art; the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC; the FLAG Art Foundation in New York (2009); WIELS[20]; Fondation Beyeler; and the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt in 2010-2011. In 2010, ArtPace in San Antonio organized a year-long retrospective of Félix González-Torres's billboards.[21] The Istanbul Biennial in 2011, instead of choosing a theory or theme as a unifying rubric, mounted five group shows around the main themes that inspired González-Torres’s work — love, death, abstraction, contested histories and territories.[22]
In 2007, González-Torres was selected as the United States' official representative at the Venice Biennale, curated by Nancy Spector. The artist's previously controversial status influenced the 1995 decision to reject him for the Venice pavilion in favour of Bill Viola.[23] His posthumous show (the only other posthumous representative from the United States was Robert Smithson in 1982)[24] at the U.S. Pavilion featured, among others, "Untitled", 1992-95, a never-before-realized sculpture in the courtyard of the pavilion: two adjoining, circular reflecting pools, the sides of which touch just enough at a single point to share an almost undetectable flow of water. Between 1992 and 1995 Gonzalez-Torres sketched at least five variations of these pools, expanding upon his motif of paired rings. The first known sketch for the twin pools represents González-Torres' submission to an outdoor sculpture competition sponsored by Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington in 1992. The drawing indicates that each pool should be twelve-feet in diameter, a detail that would remain constant in each subsequent drawing and description. González-Torres returned to the motif in 1994 when planning a one-person exhibition for the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Bordeaux, which he postponed because of its proximity in time to his Guggenheim retrospective; he died before the show could be realized. For the Bordeaux installation, he envisioned a pair of indoor pools flush with the floor. When outlining his ideas for the exhibition, González-Torres also created a sketch of an outdoor version of the pools, and this is the one realized on the occasion of the Venice Biennale. Untitled and open-ended in terms of their possible materials, the pools presented here were carved from white Carrara marble.[25]
Between 2010 and 2011, a traveling retrospective, “Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Specific Objects without Specific Form”, was shown at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, and the MMK in Frankfurt. At each of the stages of the exhibition tour, the show was initially installed by the exhibition’s curator Elena Filipovic and, halfway through its duration, is completely reinstalled by a different selected artist whose own practice has been influenced by González-Torres. Artists Carol Bove, Danh Vo, and Tino Sehgal were chosen to curate the show's second half.[26]
In May 2002, the Felix González-Torres Foundation was created.[27] The Foundation hopes to "to foster an appreciation for the work of Felix González-Torres among the general public, scholars, and art historians."[27] Felix Gonzalez-Torres' work is represented by Andrea Rosen Gallery,[28] which heavily exhibited his work both before and after his death. The Foundation assisted the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University in the organization of the Felix González-Torres Community Art Project, a three-year initiative that sponsors visits of internationally renowned contemporary artists to the campus of the school.
In 2011, "Untitled" (Aparición), 1991, a stack of endlessly replenishable paper, each sheet printed with a black and white image of clouds, was sold well over the estimate for $1.6 million at Sotheby's, New York.[29]