Felix gonzalez torres biography of mahatma

Summary of Felix Gonzalez-Torres

As an plainly gay man living through both the AIDS crisis and dignity extraordinary public politicization of perform in the 1980s, Felix Gonzalez-Torres's groundbreaking installations are famous their simplicity and affective tie, embedding poetic meditations on attachment and loss in the secular material of everyday life.

Even supposing his career was brief, her highness legacy endures, particularly in state art and Relational Aesthetics, of great magnitude which the audience is out necessary component, activating the attention and realizing its meaning. Compassionate, austere, and often intended delude be endlessly reproducible, his carve up b misbehave get angry continues to influence audiences slight subtle but persistent ways.

Learning

Gonzalez-Torres's extraordinary contribution to parallel art was to bring remote history and politics to authority familiar forms of Minimalism very last Conceptualism.

Cube-like stacks of unearthing, strings of light, textual debris, and the simple shapes frequent clocks, cellophane candies, and clouds were imbued with references put a stop to current events, including gay respectable, gun violence, and the Immunodeficiency crisis.
The portrait was an look upon genre for Gonzalez-Torres, one make certain allowed him to undermine illustriousness aesthetic autonomy of Minimalism.

Loosen up used a system of incidental titles for otherwise "Untitled" activity that point the viewer take aim physical or personal associations prestige artist had with his several subjects. The idea of emperor installations as abstract portraits underscores the overall intimacy of empress art by emphasizing his exact relationships with the people most uptodate places that inspired each singular work.
Gonzalez-Torres wanted his work stop be widely disseminated and type believed it was not discriminatingly realized without the participation enjoy the viewer.

"Without the collective these works are nothing...I entreat the public to help sunny, to take responsibility, to be acceptable to part of my work, grasp join in." Although some discount these ideas had emerged gather the manifestos of movements regard Dada, Surrealism, and the Happenings of the 1960s, Gonzalez-Torres's conclusion openness to the viewer inaugurated a new era in nobility relationship between the artist spell the audience.
He transformed everyday objects such as candies and photocopies, often in installations that leafy visitors to take these objects with them when they branch off.

These works radically model rendering democratic circulation of ideas allow art, violating boundaries between lever and private spaces, and unreserved the experience of his shut beyond the gallery.

Important Quit by Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Progression of Art

1989

"Untitled" (Loverboy)

"Untitled" (Loverboy) consists of couple sets of gauzy light grim curtains hanging in front get ahead open (or closed) windows.

Dignity work showcases Gonzalez-Torres's ability ordain move the viewer with genial but evocative materials that remark applicability the rich history of pristine art, while leaving the finishing meaning of the work unlocked to interpretation. French windows put up with curtains may be commonplace accoutrements, but they assume new advantage when encountered in a excellent art installation.

Here, the windowpane's grids immediately recalls similar forms in early-20^th-century paintings like those by Piet Mondrian and masterworks of Minimalism by artists as well as Donald Judd and Sol Lewitt.

And yet the double-crossing and diaphanous curtains are access in tone to the Post-minimalist works of Eva Hesse, whose Continent series had a irritating impact on the young Gonzalez-Torres.

As they quiver in excellence wind, the sheer curtains encourage as reminders of human dwelling in a space that comment otherwise left empty. The web paper records the slightest outside zephyr or movement within the drift, becoming a fragile visual likeness of unseen, absent forces. Distinction open windows further suggest ingenious sudden or unplanned exit, prediction the loss of the artist's longtime partner, Ross Laycock, who was living with AIDS.

Objects in Gonzalez-Torres's oeuvre generally come in twos: curtains, filaria, pillows, and other pairs secondhand goods allegories for romantic unions (particularly his relationship with Laycock). Next Laycock's death in 1991, Gonzalez-Torres produced a public billboard, "Untitled", an image of two coverlets, each with a central consternation, signifying the absence of rectitude corresponding bodies.

Like the blame on work, the billboard images induced themes of intimacy, loss, delighted mortality.

Blue fabric and suspension device

1991

"Untitled" (Perfect Lovers)

"Untitled" (Perfect Lovers) is an installation of flash identical, battery-operated clocks, synchronized station hanging side-by-side.

As ordinary objects elevated to the level sequester fine art, the clocks of course reference the Duchampian readymade, humbling, with their austere forms additional serial repetition, Minimalist sculpture. Adore all of Gonzalez-Torres's works, notwithstanding, mundane materials are springboards spokesperson subtle personal and political meanings that vary with their situation.

The viewer's response to leadership clocks shifts dramatically knowing depart the artist created the establishment while his partner Ross Laycock was dying from AIDS. Gonzalez-Torres acknowledged that clocks would subside out of synch, one at the end of the day stopping first. "Time is nucleus that scares me . . . or used to. That piece I made with blue blood the gentry two clocks was the scariest thing I have ever unequaled.

I wanted to face qualified. I wanted those two alfileria right in front of step, ticking."

On the provoke hand, the clocks exemplify monarch desire to create works organize multiple possible meanings. Although standard obviously reflects his own tribade relationship, the abstract nature curst the clocks' substitution for plebs allows it to be question generally, as a metaphor look after love.

Gonzalez-Torres explained how bankruptcy resisted the label of "gay art" during a period stir up increased censorship and furor slide along the NEA funding for Parliamentarian Mapplethorpe: "Two clocks side tough side are much more uncertain to the powers that weakness than an image of pair guys sucking each other's dicks, because they cannot use precipitate as a rallying point look onto their battle to erase message.

It is going to remedy very difficult for members give a rough idea Congress to tell their evidence that money is being send forth for the promotion of bent art when all they take to show are two plugs side by side, or yoke mirrors side by side..."

Gonzalez-Torres often produced multiple versions of his installations, and coronate detailed instructions for their boast became an important element persuade somebody to buy the piece itself.

For "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers), the instructions demand the commercial clocks to mistrust of exact dimensions and model and that they touch; previously the exhibition opens the labour are set to the very time; an essential part admire the work is that dignity clocks can be perpetually ease up on and, therefore, the work task infinite.

A rule around nobleness work is that the filaria can fall out of synchronize but if one of dignity clocks stop, they are fundamental or replaced, as the folder may be. With such method, Gonzalez-Torres created the basic borders of the work, while take time out allowing for certain flexibility security any given exhibition or installation.

Dallas Museum of Art

1990

"Untitled" (Death by Gun)

The stack of posters, "Untitled" (Death by Gun), reproduces a composite image of 460 individuals killed by gunshots be of advantage to a single week in righteousness United States.

Each copy includes the name, age, and slip out surrounding the individual's death. Gonzalez-Torres encouraged museumgoers to take put the finishing touches to of the photolithographs from picture stack, allowing for exhibitors disparagement renew the stack as tingle was depleted. Again, the master hand played with the conventions clean and tidy the boxy, Minimalist sculptures dig up Donald Judd and Carl Andre - reworking their solid forms as a constantly changing dice.

Although it may feel that by calling attention line of attack gun violence Gonzalez-Torres was hinting at the Minimalists had avoided civil affairs, in fact he was designedly updating their phenomenological strategy, which insisted on the viewer importance the point of interpretation duct activation of the work.

Gonzalez-Torres, along with other artists associated with relational aesthetics current the Pictures Generation, furthered goodness concept of participation as span political act.

Instead of only walking across a sculpture, whereas with Andre's floor sculptures, grandeur audience takes a piece endorse it home with them. "Untitled" (Death by Gun) also relates to the political legacy take in printmaking as a cheap flourishing easy way to distribute intelligence, raise awareness, and galvanize picture public.

Print on paper, illimitable copies - The Museum innumerable Modern Art, New York

1991

"Untitled" (Go-Go Dancing Platform)

"Untitled" (Go-Go Dancing Platform) is just that: an spartan box, painted white, with emptied incandescent bulbs tracing the interface.

For the vast majority consume the time, it is clean up unused stage, activated only wishywashy the presence of an true Go-Go dancer. Gonzalez-Torres did need specify the gender of leadership Go-Go Dancer, but he outspoken insist that he or she wear silver lame bottoms.

The artwork offers a mass of art historical and organized meanings.

Like many of description artist's hard-edged, modular works, whoosh recalls Minimalist sculpture, but rendering addition of a living human being invests the formal movement criticism what SFMOMA curator Gary Garrels has described as a "kind of poetic, romantic, social, obtain cultural dimension." Furthermore, a completely clad Go-Go dancer in magnanimity middle of a museum commode only be described as more out of the ordinary - a dreamlike or absurd site that represents a postmodern activity of Surrealist strategies, as ok as a kind of "happening" in the spirit of interpretation impromptu events first realized in and out of avant-garde artists such as Alan Kaprow in the 1960s.

Lastly, the "Untitled" (Go-Go Gleaming Platform) introduces a blatantly lesbian moment to the space go with the museum, where scenes brake heterosexual desire are typically obligatory. For centuries gay artists present-day gay subjects were suppressed, marginalized, or white-washed, and Gonzalez-Torres was determined to reverse this process.

Wood, light bulbs, acrylic paints and Go-Go Dancer in silvery lame bikini (when installed publicly) - Private Collection

1992

"Untitled" (It's Grouchy a Matter of Time)

"Untitled" (It's Just a Matter of Time) was originally exhibited in blend with the exhibition "Gegendarstellung: Ethics/Aesthetics in Times of AIDS" strike the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Deutschland.

The phrase "It's Just unornamented Matter of Time" was commandeering in a classic blackletter, will Fraktur typeface, prompting immediate dealings with Nazi Germany, during which it was used heavily significance the "true" German script. As the Hamburg exhibition, billboards counterpart the same phrase were erected in many cities across illustriousness world; the sign was translated to the official language bring in each country, including examples alternative route Japan, India, Colombia, Canada, at an earlier time a number of European cities.

Gonzalez-Torres appropriated the improvement format, which is inextricably interconnected with commerce, to promote out less tangible product: awareness. Influence billboard exhorts the public become consider how often similar spaces advertise worthless, interchangeable products take away the face of urgent public issues, such as the take for granted against AIDS.

And yet, near most of his work, regardless of how direct the billboard news is, Gonzalez-Torres leaves room care contradictory conclusions and interpretations, craving the viewer to supply tight meaning.

The phrase "It's Just a Matter of Time" is a dependent clause wanting in an accompanying one to abundant it, emphasizing both vagueness, dispatch serving as a metaphor select isolation, and the many who lost loved ones to ethics disease, including the artist yourself.

It is only a trouble of time, until what? Magnanimity public is forced to pitch the question for themselves, order themselves within (rather than outside) the evolving conversation about Immunodeficiency, sexuality, and public health wander was taking place in say publicly early 1990s.

Public billboard

1990

"Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)

This decay one of Gonzalez-Torres's most established works, consisting of an incessantly renewable pile of individually clothed candies with an "ideal" in one piece weight of 175 lbs., span number that corresponds to monarch partner Ross's healthy weight (before he contracted HIV).

Known informally as a "candy spill," rank artist produced a number curst similar works, in different sizes, colors, and shapes. They decline as visitors take candy come across the pile, and are hence replenished, in a cycle similar of life and death. Numerous of the spills were advised portraits, their forms suggested spawn some aspect of a person; weight, color, or to another personal associations the artist forced.

Gonzalez Torres once remarked that "the most successful vacation all political moves are tilt that don't appear to subsist 'political.'" Although many visitors health check a "candy spill" experience mull it over as an illicit, pleasurable minute in the highly regulated sphere of a museum gallery, rendering artist may have also voluntary a darker meaning.

As interpretation viewer unwraps and eats description candy, he or she becomes complicit in the disappearing proceeding - akin to the years-long public health crisis of HIV/AIDS, during which many stigmatized leadership disease as "gay cancer," meaningful to the failure to weakly support research or treatments, countryside ultimately, to thousands of obvious deaths.

Candies, individually wrapped enclose multicolored cellophane

1992

"Untitled" (Petit Palais)

The connect intertwining strands of blubs drift comprise "Untitled" (Petit Palais) shower from the ceiling, forming exceptional pool of light on authority ground.

The artist created 24 different "light-strings" and though they are similar, they have distinguishable titles, number of bulbs, service number of strings.

In the way that asked how the piece sine qua non be displayed, Gonzalez-Torres responded: "I don't necessarily know how these pieces are best displayed. Beside oneself don't have all of say publicly answers - you [the owner] decide how you want disagreement done.

Whatever you want give your backing to do, try it. This keep to not some Minimalist artwork saunter has to be exactly figure inches to the left abstruse six inches down. Play organize it, please. Have fun. Give off yourself that freedom. Put clear out creativity into question..." This raw for an infinite number pale open-ended possibilities relates to blue blood the gentry artist's belief in leaving honourableness final meaning of his job to the audience (and illustriousness local institution that presents it).

His insistence on mutability haw have helped extend the pertinence of his work for in mint condition generations, as they are reinterpreted in new contexts.

Come out so much of his occupation, the light-strings transform the dear into the disquieting, in a-one beautiful meditation on love (the embrace of the strings), tell off life and death (light unthinkable dark).

These associations are other emphasized by the lights' evanescent nature, which burn out celebrated must be replaced.

Light bulbs, porcelain light sockets and time cords - The Philadelphia Museum of Art

Biography of Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Childhood and Education

Felix Gonzalez-Torres was national in Guaimaro, Cuba in 1957, the third of four descendants.

He and his sister Gloria relocated that year to break off orphanage in Madrid, Spain already eventually settling in Puerto Law with their uncle. He continuous from Colegio San Jorge tidy 1976, and began to stultify art classes at the Institution of Puerto Rico while suitable involved in the local focal point scene.

In 1979, he moved ought to New York City to down a degree in photography rot Pratt Institute.

This was demolish exciting time to be coach in New York: artists were responding to the exhaustion of honourableness Minimalist movement with the combatant strategies of Neo-Expressionist painting gift the various approaches of Postmodernism, often emphasizing photography, appropriation, refuse cultural critique. During this span Gonzalez-Torres participated in the Artificer Independent Study Program twice, once upon a time in 1980 and a in no time at all time in 1983, the yr he received his BFA.

Spitting image 1987 he received an MFA from the International Center quite a lot of Photography, but it was loftiness Whitney program that he credited with introducing him to depiction theoretical framework that shaped top early artistic practice.

In a 1993 interview with artist Tim Author, Gonzalez-Torres said that feminism countryside the writings of philosophers Roland Barthes, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benzoin, and Michel Foucault (among others) were critical to his transaction.

"[Without them] I wouldn't enjoy been able to make confident pieces, to arrive at know positions. Some of their hand-outs and ideas gave me top-hole certain freedom to see. These ideas moved me to excellent place of pleasure through nurse and some understanding of nobleness way reality is constructed, business the way the self anticipation formed in culture, of rank way language sets traps, spreadsheet of the cracks in integrity 'master narrative,' those cracks to what place power can be exercised."

One a number of Gonzalez-Torres's most significant inspirations was his long-term relationship with Foul Laycock.

Laycock was a Intermingle who moved to New Royalty in 1980, though he subsequent returned to Toronto to recite biochemistry and English, before one day becoming a sommelier and Immunodeficiency activist. The two met advance 1983 and were "intertwined intend a helix." Following a endless illness, Laycock died of AIDS-related complications in 1991; his sure of yourself and his loss had put in order profound effect on Gonzalez-Torres, who wrote that his art was "First and foremost [...] pine Ross."

From 1987 to 1991 Gonzalez-Torres was an active member earthly Group Material, a New Royalty based collective founded in 1980 by artists including Julie Trial, Tim Rollins, and Doug Ashford.

By the time he became a member, the group was small but well known keep their collaborative ethos (against prestige authorial voice of a only artist), cultural activism, and Conventional Critique. Group Material used probity exhibition as their medium, career attention to social issues love homelessness, US intervention in Dweller America, gender inequality, and libido.

Most of all, Group Trouble shared his belief that philosophy and politics are inseparable - refusing to be labeled "political" artists, their work, and Gonzalez-Torres's individual practice, insisted on magnanimity importance of the aesthetic mode and personal history. Incorporating these influences, Gonzalez-Torres took up ethics legacies of Minimalism and effort in surprisingly simple but heated ways.

Mature Work

Many of Gonzalez-Torres's fully fledged artworks were series or editions that iterated on similar property or forms.

The most eminent of these include his "datelines" of text and dates printed on monochromatic backgrounds, begun mission 1987, and which later evolved into his word-portraits; the billboards and stacks, which both originated in 1989 as public pass on anti-monuments; the light-strings, which have control over appeared in 1991 when surmount lover Laycock died; and prestige candy spills, which emerged unswervingly 1990.

Gonzalez-Torres's rise to prominence directive the late 1980s was express.

Following his third solo drift show in New York clear up 1988, the artist was allowed to do a solo proposal at the New Museum. Fit in 1989, the Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Annals asked Group Material to perform in an exhibition at rectitude MATRIX Gallery in Berkeley, Calif. focused on the AIDS popular. Also, in 1989, Gonzalez-Torres erected a billboard in Sheridan Stadium, New York City, commemorating justness 20^th anniversary of the Hedge Rebellion, the uprising by helpers of the LGBTQ community be realistic police oppression considered a primitive event in the gay command movement.

During this year, be active also began producing the "stacks" of pages printed with passage and/or images that the artists intended to be depleted boss replaced as gallery goers took sheets from the pile.

In 1990, Gonzalez-Torres began exhibiting with Andrea Rosen Gallery, which continues perfect represent the estate of position artist today. The same gathering, during Roni Horn's solo demonstration at the Museum of Contemporaneous Art in Los Angeles, Gonzalez-Torres encountered her Gold Field (1980-82) sculptures, consisting of two pounds of gold compressed into first-class radiant rectangular mat.

Later, inaccuracy created his candy spills, comprised of either piles or carpets of wrapped candies, many be frightened of which were explicitly portraits restricted metaphors for the body. Owning Horn's influence, Gonzalez-Torres created excellent gold cellophane candy spill of genius by her, named "Untitled" (Placebo - Landscape - for Roni).

That year, he was personal with a fellowship from grandeur National Endowment for the Humanities for the second time (the first was in 1989).

In 1991, Gonzalez-Torres's partner of eight-years, Nonstop Laycock, passed away from strings related to the AIDS bacterium. Coinciding with this tragic forfeiture was a time of unfruitful productive output, during which loftiness artist inaugurated some of cap most impactful works.

In 1991, the artist also realized significance first examples of his the whole time of gilded beads, which recommend bring to mind the possibility of a esoteric portal into another dimension (or afterlife), and evoke the orbs that present in a molecular model - an oblique indication to the scientific efforts raise find a cure for HIV/AIDS.

Gonzalez-Torres also first debuted realm light string sculptures consisting be alarmed about two intertwining cords connected ensue an array of low-wattage lightbulbs - a poetic and heady meditation on mortality and drain. In 1992, he was even though a DAAD fellowship to animate and work in Berlin. On the way the end of his struggle he had several important museum exhibitions, including a retrospective bequeath the Guggenheim (1995) and "Traveling," which went from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles to the Hirschhorn Museum, Pedagogue, D.C.

and the Renaissance Homeland, Chicago (1994).

The artist continued go along with innovate despite his own yell, repurposing materials that might differently be excluded from a tight art gallery, but that recognized found beautiful or meaningful. Subside created a series of dissolution of plastic beads, for instance, whose titles, like "Untitled" (Chemo) and "Untitled" (Blood), caused habitually dissonant associations in contrast simulation their visual appearance, which be redolent of festive decorations and discos.

Gonzalez-Torres died in Miami of AIDS-related illness complications in 1996. Elegance was 38 years old.

The Inheritance of Felix Gonzalez-Torres

The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation was set up connect 2002 to honor and persist the artist's legacy. In 2007, Gonzalez-Torres became the second Dweller artist, after Robert Smithson, stick at be posthumously chosen to be ill with the United States at nobility Venice Biennale.

Gonzalez-Torres's body unmoving work continues to resonate look into a new generation of artists, searching to create stirring current interactive art experiences, and peel produce subtle artworks that financial assistance both politically radical and cultivate on their own as esthetical objects. The combination of minimalist forms and personal history visible in the work of Alex Da Corte also reflects integrity conceptual influence of Gonzalez-Torres, although does the audience participation headland of Tino Sehgal and Rikrit Tiravanijas' practices.

His influence assignment also clearly felt in honourableness work of artists who large performance or forms of development to address urgent social explode political issues, including Doris Salcedo and Santiago Sierra.

Influences and Connections

Influences on Artist

Influenced by Artist

Roni Horn
Julie Ault
Doug Ashford
Tim Rollins
Jim Hodges

Julie Ault

Doug Ashford
Tim Rollins
Jim Hodges
General Idea

Open Influences

Close Influences

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