M HKA Ensembles

Installation, dimensions variable, platform: 54.6 x 182.9 x 182.9 cm.

Collection: (c) Kunstmuseum St. Gallen on permanent loan from a private collection.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres was born in Guáimaro, Cuba, in 1957. He is one of the most significant artists to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In its reduced formal vocabulary, conceptual rigor, and evocative use of everyday materials, the artist’s work resonates with meaning that is at once specific and mutable; rigorous and generous; poetic and political. Gonzalez-Torres died in Miami on January 6, 1996 from AIDS-related causes. Throughout his career, Gonzalez-Torres’s involvement in social and political causes as an openly gay man fueled his interest in the overlap of private and public life. From 1987 to 1991, he was part of Group Material, a New York-based art collective whose members worked collaboratively to initiate community education and cultural activism. Employing simple, everyday materials (stacks of paper, puzzles, candy, strings of lights, beads) and a reduced aesthetic vocabulary reminiscent of both minimalism and conceptual art to address themes such as love and loss, sickness and rejuvenation, gender and sexuality, Gonzalez-Torres asked viewers to participate in establishing meaning in his works.

Every day a go-go dancer takes the empty stage unannounced, to give the best of himself. Since headphones are used, the music can only be heard by the performer, which at times gives his performance a solitary undertone. The current context of the pandemic in which we show this work contributes to the accumulating quality of this work.

Note: According to the artist's conceptual performance conditions, this work can only be in the world once at a time: on August 28, the stage will move – one week before the end of the exhibition – to Kunstmuseum St.Gallen (CH), where it will be activated.

https://www.felixgonzalez-torresfoundation.org/