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Born: 1957
Died: 1996
Summary of Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ groundbreaking installations are famous for their simplicity and affective impact, embedding poetic meditations on love and loss in the mundane material of everyday life as an openly gay man living through both the AIDS crisis and the extraordinary public politicisation of art in the 1980s. His influence lives on, notably in political art and Relational Aesthetics, where the audience is an essential component in activating the work and comprehending its significance. His artwork continues to impact viewers in subtle but persistent ways, since it is generous, austere, and generally meant to be endlessly reproduced.
Gonzalez-Torres made a significant addition to contemporary art by incorporating personal history and politics into well-known Minimalist and Conceptualist forms. The simple shapes of clocks, cellophane candies, and clouds, as well as cube-like stacks of paper, strings of light, textual fragments, and the simple shapes of clocks, cellophane candies, and clouds, were imbued with references to current events, such as gay rights, gun violence, and the AIDS crisis.
For Gonzalez-Torres, the portrait was a crucial genre, since it allowed him to challenge Minimalism’s aesthetic sovereignty. For otherwise “Untitled” pieces, he used a system of parenthetic names that lead the observer to physical or personal links the artist had with his topics. The concept of his installations as abstract portraits emphasises the overall intimacy of his work by highlighting his personal ties with the individuals or locations that inspired each piece.
Gonzalez-Torres wished for his work to be widely distributed, and he thought that it could not be fully fulfilled without the viewer’s participation. “Without the public these works are nothing…I ask the public to help me, to take responsibility, to become part of my work, to join in.” Although some of these concepts were in the manifestos of 1960s groups such as Dada, Surrealism, and the Happenings, Gonzalez-Torres’ absolute openness to the viewer marked the beginning of a new era in the artist-audience interaction.
He turned commonplace items like candy and photocopies into installations that let visitors to take the goods home with them. These works fundamentally mimic democratic circulation of ideas and art, blurring the lines between public and private places and expanding the artist’s work’s experience beyond the gallery.
Childhood
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the third of four children, was born in Guaimaro, Cuba, in 1957. That year, he and his sister Gloria moved to a Madrid orphanage before finally settling in Puerto Rico with their uncle. In 1976, he graduated from Colegio San Jorge and began taking art studies at the University of Puerto Rico while also participating in the local art scene.
He went to New York City in 1979 to pursue a photography degree at Pratt Institute. Artists were responding to the Minimalist movement’s fatigue with contrasting methods of Neo-Expressionist painting and different approaches of Postmodernism, typically stressing photography, appropriation, and cultural commentary. It was an exciting moment to be in New York. Gonzalez-Torres took part in the Whitney Independent Study Program twice during this time, once in 1980 and again in 1983, the year he obtained his BFA. He earned his MFA from the International Center of Photography in 1987.
Early Life
Feminism and the writings of thinkers Roland Barthes, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault (among others) were important to Gonzalez-Torres’ growth, he claimed in a 1993 interview with artist Tim Collins. “I wouldn’t have been able to produce certain pieces or get at certain locations without them. Some of their works and thoughts provided me the ability to view things differently. Through knowledge and some comprehension of how reality is built, how the self is formed in culture, how language lays traps, and the fractures in the’master narrative,’ those gaps where power may be exerted, these concepts took me to a place of joy.”
His long-term friendship with Ross Laycock was a major source of inspiration for Gonzalez-Torres. Laycock, a Canadian, relocated to New York in 1980, but subsequently returned to Toronto to study biochemistry and English before working as a sommelier and AIDS campaigner. In 1983, they met and were “intertwined like a helix.” Laycock died of AIDS-related complications in 1991, following a long illness; his life and death had a great impact on Gonzalez-Torres, who said that his painting was “First and foremost, about Ross.”
Gonzalez-Torres was a member of Group Material, a New York-based collective formed in 1980 by artists Julie Ault, Tim Rollins, and Doug Ashford, from 1987 until 1991. By the time he joined, the group was tiny but well-known for its collaborative spirit (as opposed to a single artist’s authorial voice), cultural activism, and Institutional Critique. The show served as a platform for Group Material to raise awareness about social concerns such as homelessness, US interference in Latin America, gender inequity, and sexuality.
Most importantly, Group Material shared Gonzalez-Torres’ view that aesthetics and politics are inextricably linked; refusing to be branded “political” artists, their work, and Gonzalez-Torres’ individual practise, emphasised the significance of aesthetic experience and personal history. Gonzalez-Torres picked up the legacies of Minimalism and feminism in surprisingly basic yet impactful ways, incorporating both inspirations.
Mid Life
Many of Gonzalez-Torres’ mature works were series or editions based on the same materials or shapes. His “datelines” which began in 1987 and grew into his word-portraits; the billboards and stacks, which both began in 1989 as public art anti-monuments; the light-strings, which first appeared in 1991 after his beloved Laycock died; and the candy spills, which began in 1990.
Gonzalez-Torres rose to fame quickly in the late 1980s. The artist was invited to undertake a solo project at the New Museum after his third solo gallery presentation in New York in 1988. The Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive invited Group Material to take part in an AIDS-related exhibition at the MATRIX Gallery in Berkeley, California in 1989. In 1989, Gonzalez-Torres constructed a billboard in New York City’s Sheridan Square honouring the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, an uprising by LGBTQ people against police brutality that is considered a watershed moment in the homosexual rights movement.
Gonzalez-Torres began showing with Andrea Rosen Gallery in 1990, and the gallery continues to represent the artist’s estate today. In the same year, Gonzalez-Torres came across Roni Horn’s Gold Field (1980-82) sculptures, which were made of two pounds of gold compacted into a dazzling rectangular mat, at Roni Horn’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Later, he made sugar spills, which were made up of mounds or carpets of wrapped sweets, many of which were explicit pictures or metaphors for the body. Gonzalez-Torres acknowledged Horn’s impact by creating “Untitled” a gold cellophane candy spill inspired by her (Placebo – Landscape – for Roni).
Ross Laycock, Gonzalez-eight-year Torres’s boyfriend, died in 1991 from symptoms connected to the AIDS infection. This terrible death occurred amid a period of prolific creative productivity, during which the artist debuted some of his most important works. In 1991, the artist also created the first instances of his golden bead curtains, which resemble the orbs seen in a molecular model and indicate the potential of a magical doorway into another realm (or eternity) – an oblique allusion to scientific efforts to discover a treatment for HIV/AIDS.
Late Life
Gonzalez-Torres also introduced his light string sculptures, which are composed of two interweaving strands connected to an assortment of low-wattage lightbulbs and serve as a lyrical and moving reflection on mortality and loss. He was awarded a DAAD scholarship to live and work in Berlin in 1992. He had many significant museum shows at the end of his life, including a retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1995 and “Traveling,” which travelled from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. and the Renaissance Society in Chicago (1994).
Despite his sickness, the artist continued to create, reusing materials that would usually be rejected by a fine art gallery but that he considered beautiful or significant. He made a series of plastic bead curtains, for example, with titles like “Untitled” (Chemo) and “Untitled” (Blood), which conjured up usually discordant associations in contrast to their aesthetic appearance, which conjured up images of joyful decorations and discos. Gonzalez-Torres died in Miami in 1996 as a result of AIDS-related illness complications. He was 38 years old at the time.
In 2002, the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation was established to commemorate and carry on the artist’s legacy. After Robert Smithson, Gonzalez-Torres was the second American artist to be chosen posthumously to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Gonzalez-Torres’ work continues to inspire a new generation of artists who are looking to create moving and interactive art experiences, as well as delicate artworks that are both politically radical and stand alone as beautiful objects.
Famous Art by Felix Gonzalez-Torres
“Untitled” (Loverboy)
1989
Two sets of gauzy light blue curtains dangle in front of open (or closed) windows in “Untitled” (Loverboy). Gonzalez-Torres’ ability to affect the spectator with basic yet evocative materials that reference the vast history of contemporary art is demonstrated in this piece, which leaves the work’s final meaning up to interpretation. Although French windows and curtains are ubiquitous, they take on new significance when used in a fine art installation. The grids in the windowpane instantly remind me of comparable shapes in early twentieth-century paintings by Piet Mondrian and masterworks of Minimalism by artists like Donald Judd and Sol Lewitt.
“Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform)
1991
The “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) is a simple white box with naked incandescent lights tracing the edge. The great majority of the time, it is an empty stage that is only energised when a real Go-Go dancer appears. Gonzalez-Torres did not define the Go-Go Dancer’s gender, but he did stipulate that he or she must wear silver lame bottoms.
“Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)
1990
This is one of Gonzalez-Torres’ most well-known works, consisting of an ever renewing mound of individually wrapped candies with a “ideal” total weight of 175 pounds, which corresponds to his partner Ross’s healthy weight (before he contracted HIV). The artist created a number of similar pieces in various sizes, colours, and forms, which became known as a “candy spill,” They are depleted as visitors remove sweets from the mound, and then refilled, in a life-and-death cycle. Many of the spills were intended to be portraits, with their shapes influenced by some feature of a person’s appearance, such as weight, colour, or other personal connotations established by the artist.
BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)
Best for Students and a Huge Time Saver
- Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ groundbreaking installations are famous for their simplicity and affective impact, embedding poetic meditations on love and loss in the mundane material of everyday life as an openly gay man living through both the AIDS crisis and the extraordinary public politicisation of art in the 1980s.
- His influence lives on, notably in political art and Relational Aesthetics, where the audience is an essential component in activating the work and comprehending its significance.
- His artwork continues to impact viewers in subtle but persistent ways, since it is generous, austere, and generally meant to be endlessly reproduced.
- Gonzalez-Torres made a significant addition to contemporary art by incorporating personal history and politics into well-known Minimalist and Conceptualist forms.
- The simple shapes of clocks, cellophane candies, and clouds, as well as cube-like stacks of paper, strings of light, textual fragments, and the simple shapes of clocks, cellophane candies, and clouds, were imbued with references to current events, such as gay rights, gun violence, and the AIDS crisis.
- For Gonzalez-Torres, the portrait was a crucial genre, since it allowed him to challenge Minimalism’s aesthetic sovereignty.
- The concept of his installations as abstract portraits emphasises the overall intimacy of his work by highlighting his personal ties with the individuals or locations that inspired each piece.
- Gonzalez-Torres wished for his work to be widely distributed, and he thought that it could not be fully fulfilled without the viewer’s participation.
- He turned commonplace items like candy and photocopies into installations that let visitors to take the goods home with them.
- These works fundamentally mimic democratic circulation of ideas and art, blurring the lines between public and private places and expanding the artist’s work’s experience beyond the gallery.
Information Citations
En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.
