Book dossier

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

by Felix Gonzalez-Torres

One of the most significant artists to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Félix González-Torres (1957-96) reduced formal vocabulary, conceptual rigor and evocative use of everyday materials that resonates with meaning that is at once specific and mutable, rigorous and generous, poetic and political. Featuring several key bodies of work from throughout the artist's career, this publication showcases a series of distinct installations at David Zwirner in New York in 2017. 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. Despite the resolute abstraction of much of his work, Gonzalez-Torres worked with familiar materials, from his iconic candy spill works to his evocative light string pieces, to mirrors, clocks and curtains. His work activates the architecture of the various spaces, the physicality of the viewer, the past and present, continuously maintaining its relevance. Opening with details of the exhibition and images of visitors in the spaces, the publication walks the reader through each piece.