FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES

Many of Félix González-Torres' artworks expose details of his personal life, including his relationship with his boyfriend, Ross Laycock, who wasted away from AIDS-related complications before the artist himself died of the virus.

Group Material

From 1987 to 1991, González-Torres was a member of Group Material—a collaborative collective focused on community education and activism. Group Material's most well-known work was AIDS Timeline (1989).

AIDS Timeline was a solo exhibition at the University of California at Berkeley's MATRIX Gallery (November 1989–January 1990). On the gallery's walls, a horizontal timeline of the AIDS crisis from the beginnings of the epidemic through to the present moment was installed. The installation diagrammed various responses to the crisis through quotes, statistics, policies, and public opinion. In the installation, Group Material emphasised the relationships between the collected responses. In such works, rather than formal or commercial values, the focus was on the facts and how they could reveal socio-political climates that would otherwise be ignored.

Dateline Series

González-Torres 'dateline' series was produced in 1987. For this series, the artist created non-linear chronologies to illustrate the complexity of individual and collective memory and identity. In one self-portrait from the series, 'Red Canoe 1987' and 'Bay of Pigs 1961' sit side-by-side, allowing imaginative leaps to narrate a deeply subjective history.

The viewer, as a participator and activator

With the influence of Group Material's socio-political axis, González-Torres involved the viewer as a participator and activator in many of his artworks. For example, his oeuvre includes large piles of wrapped candies; in these installations, including Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991), the candies spill from a corner of the gallery space or are spread on the floor. Viewers are invited to take a candy—to consume the artwork. These piles can be infinitely replenished or left to diminish. From 1989, the artist created installations consisting of tall stacks of paper printed with words or images. As with the candy, viewers could take the papers home with them. Such works can be seen aesthetically as a descendant of earlier Minimalist and Conceptualist movements. However, the artist's work places more emphasis on the everyday and modes of direct viewer activation than the stoically monumental works of his predecessors.

Some scholars have observed González-Torres's work through the lens of Bertolt Brecht's theory of epic theatre, which posits that art can transform the spectator from a passive viewer to an active participant who can enact social change.

In both the stacks of paper and the piles of candy, González-Torres' work presents a certain level of wasting away at the hands of the constant visitors. This has sometimes been linked to the decay of the body from AIDS, especially in Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), where the name of the artist's lover—who died due to AIDS-related complications in 1991—is directly applied to the depleting pile. However, it can also be interpreted as a gesture of generosity and love, such as the artist received from Laycock in their life together. Indeed, many of the artist's works can be read in this parallel narrative of loving generosity and melancholy despair.

González-Torres Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1991)—where two matching clocks tick side-by-side on a wall—could be interpreted as a simple but deeply touching gesture of the synchronicity in a partnership, where two hearts beat (or tick) as one. It could also be interpreted as the borrowed time of shared life; as the clocks' batteries run out, perhaps the clocks will slow, jump out of sync, or one will simply stop, leaving the other alone in its rhythm. In these two clocks, the artist cuttingly encapsulates the body's materiality and the objects' soft humanity.

Human intimacy

During his career, González-Torres often used objects to encapsulate human intimacy. In one project in 1992, his photograph, Untitled (1991), was posted on 24 billboards in New York City. The picture showed a bed, empty and unmade, with only traces of the weight of two heads on pillows side-by-side. The bodies are elsewhere, outside of the scene.

The installation was made during the AIDS crisis, where love and death lived and slept side by side. Such images remind the viewer of how people may be embodied in objects long after they are gone. In its installation throughout New York, the photograph also shows that these memories are hard to let go of once they find their way into the most everyday of objects and spaces.

Exhibitions

González-Torres has been exhibited internationally and is included in the permanent collections of many major art museums around the world, such as the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, Tate, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. In 2007, he represented the USA at the 52^nd Venice Biennale.

Notable solo exhibitions include:

• Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return, National Portrait Gallery and Archives of American Art, The Smithsonian, Washington, D.C. (2024).
• Felix Gonzales-Torres, Dia Beacon, New York (2024).
• Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Politics of Relation, Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2021).
• Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2016).
• Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Double, PLATEAU and Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2012).

Selected solo exhibitions include:

• Queer Histories, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), São Paulo (2024).
• David Zwirner: 30 years, David Zwirner, Los Angeles (2024).
• Felix Gonzalez-Torres - Roni Horn, Pinault Collection, Bourse de Commerce, Paris (2022).

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