Metropolitan Museum Of Art To Host First Felix Gonzalez-Torres Show In Over 30 Years

(MENAFN- USA Art News) The Metropolitan Museum of Art will open a major exhibition dedicated to Felix Gonzalez-Torres in New York City in June, marking the artist's first significant show in the city in over three decades. Titled“The Spaces Between,” the exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago, which will concurrently present a separate exhibition focusing on the Cuban-born American artist. Gonzalez-Torres died in 1996 from complications related to AIDS.

“The Spaces Between” draws its title from a line in an essay by Elizabeth Bishop that Gonzalez-Torres faxed to gallerist Andrea Rosen in 1994. The show will feature more than 40 works, encompassing installation, sculpture, photography, painting, and video. These pieces will be integrated into 14 of The Met's permanent collection galleries, rather than being confined to the modern and contemporary art wing. This approach aims to place the late artist's work“in conversation with 5,000 years of human creativity,” according to museum director and CEO Max Hollein in a press statement.

Key works from the late 1980s and early 1990s will be highlighted, exemplifying Gonzalez-Torres's politically charged conceptual art. His practice often explored themes of desire, love, and loss against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic's widespread tragedies and early deaths. Among these is“Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform)” from 1991, featuring a light blue platform with 48 lightbulbs, activated daily by a dancer in silver lamé briefs, tube socks, and sneakers. This work evokes both an elegy for gay men affected by AIDS and a captivating spectacle.

Other pieces in the exhibition convey profound grief, such as“Untitled (Perfect Lovers)” from 1997–90, which consists of a pair of clocks destined to fall out of sync. Also included is the candy pile“Untitled (Revenge)” from 1991, which is reminiscent of his 175-pound candy sculpture portrait of his lover, who passed away from an AIDS-related illness in 1991.

While the open-ended nature of Gonzalez-Torres's work has contributed to its enduring relevance, it has also led to curatorial interpretations that have sparked public criticism. For instance, in 2022, the Art Institute of Chicago reinstalled“Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” from 1991 with a new label that omitted any mention of AIDS or the artist's deceased lover, Ross Laycock, focusing solely on its aesthetic qualities. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic and a rise in anti-Asian violence, the social-media-friendly restaging of Gonzalez-Torres's 1990“'Untitled' (Fortune Cookie Corner)” by David Zwirner and Andrea Rosen drew scrutiny.

Gonzalez-Torres's significant contributions to conceptual art, both formally and aesthetically, have been showcased in major solo exhibitions, most recently at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. However, like artists such as Barbara Kruger, Louis Lawler, Carrie Mae Weems, and Hans Haacke, with whom he collaborated in the Group Material collective in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gonzalez-Torres viewed aesthetics as inseparable from politics. He stated in a 1993 interview with artist Ross Bleckner that“there is never such a thing as an apolitical or inert artwork.”

This rejection of artistic fixity appears central to“The Spaces Between,” where Gonzalez-Torres's art will be presented as both a historical record and an evolving offering that continually invites new interpretations.“Presenting it at The Met, spanning the Museum and departments, Gonzalez-Torres's work gives us the opportunity to witness what binds humanity across time and what fixes each of us in our present,” Breslin added.

Source: Hyperallergic

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