{"id":355239,"date":"2026-09-24T01:38:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T01:38:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/355239\/"},"modified":"2026-09-24T01:38:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T01:38:16","slug":"the-met-to-present-first-major-felix-gonzalez-torres-show-in-nyc-in-decades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/355239\/","title":{"rendered":"The Met to Present First Major Felix Gonzalez-Torres Show in NYC in Decades"},"content":{"rendered":"

News<\/a><\/p>\n

Scattered across the museum’s permanent collection galleries, “The Spaces Between” brings together more than 40 works from the late conceptual artist.<\/p>\n


\n \"Phillip
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"Felix Gonzalez-Torres, \u201cUntitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform)” (1991) (photo Adam Milner\/Hyperallergic)<\/p>\n

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the first major exhibition on Felix Gonzalez-Torres in New York in over 30 years. Opening next June, The Spaces Between is organized in conjunction with the Art Institute of Chicago, which will simultaneously host a different exhibition on the Cuban-born American artist who died from AIDS-related complications in 1996.<\/p>\n

Titled after a line from an Elizabeth Bishop essay that Gonzalez-Torres had faxed to gallerist Andrea Rosen in 1994, The Spaces Between will bring together more than 40 works spanning installation, sculpture, photography, painting, and video. Dispersed throughout 14 of The Met’s permanent collection galleries, rather than in the modern and contemporary wing, the show will place the late artist\u2019s work \u201cin conversation with 5,000 years of human creativity,\u201d museum director and CEO Max Hollein said in a press statement.<\/p>\n

Highlights include three notable works from the late 1980s and early \u201990s that epitomize Gonzalez-Torres’s politically charged conceptual practice, which often revolved around the transformation of desire, love, and loss amid the widespread tragedies and early deaths brought on by the AIDS epidemic. <\/p>\n

\u201cUntitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform)\u201d (1991), in which a light blue platform bounded by 48 lightbulbs is activated once a day by a dancer wearing only silver lam\u00e9 briefs, tube socks, and sneakers, hovers somewhere between an elegy for the communities of gay men wiped out in the early years of AIDS and a spectacle<\/a> that seduces its viewers. Other works bellow an inescapable grief, including \u201cUntitled (Perfect Lovers)\u201d (1997\u201390), a pair of clocks destined for desynchronization, and the candy pile \u201cUntitled (Revenge)\u201d (1991), similar to his 175-pound candy sculptural portrait of Torres’s lover, who died from an AIDS-related illness in 1991.<\/p>\n

\u201cFelix Gonzalez-Torres made a history-changing body of work that never chose between the personal and the political, the piercingly direct and the generously enigmatic,\u201d said David Breslin, The Met\u2019s modern and contemporary art curator in charge. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe AIDS crisis was the crucible that forged his resolute conceptual clarity, and his brilliance was creating an open-ended body of work where new meanings can be embedded into historical ones,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

While the openness of Gonzalez-Torres\u2019s work has often been a source of longevity, it has also been subjected to curatorial interpretations that have elicited public pushback. This was the case in 2022<\/a>, when the Art Institute of Chicago reinstalled \u201cUntitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)\u201d (1991) with a new label that omitted any mention of AIDS or the artist\u2019s deceased lover, Ross Laycock, and focused only on the work\u2019s aesthetic merit.\u00a0In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and rising anti-Asian violence, some questioned<\/a> David Zwirner and Andrea Rosen’s buzzy, social-media-friendly restaging of Gonzalez-Torres’s 1990 \u201c\u2018Untitled\u2019 (Fortune Cookie Corner)\u201d.<\/p>\n

Gonzalez-Torres\u2019s formal and aesthetic contributions to conceptual art have been the subject of major solo exhibitions, most recently at the Museo Reina Sof\u00eda in Madrid. However, as with the work of artists including Barbara Kruger, Louis Lawler, Carrie Mae Weems, and Hans Haacke, whom he worked with in the Group Material collective in the late 1980s and early \u201990s, aesthetics were inseparable from politics for Gonzalez-Torres, who told fellow artist Ross Bleckner in a 1993 interview<\/a> that \u201cthere is never such a thing as an apolitical or inert artwork.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

That aversion to fixity appears to be at the center of The Spaces Between, where Gonzalez-Torres\u2019s work will be situated both as a historical document and as an offering that continually opens itself to new resonances.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cPresenting it at The Met, spanning the Museum and departments, Gonzalez-Torres\u2019s work gives us the opportunity to witness what binds humanity across time and what fixes each of us in our present,\u201d said Breslin.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"News Scattered across the museum’s permanent collection galleries, “The Spaces Between” brings together more than 40 works from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":355240,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,56,63,65,64],"class_list":["post-355239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=355239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355239\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/355240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}