Love and memory, time and change, death and loss—like no other American artist of his generation Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996) linked the most private experiences with social and political themes, translating them into a reduced aesthetic vocabulary reminiscent of Minimal and Conceptual Art. Gonzalez-Torres, who died at the age of just 38, rejected the traditional notion of art as a work. In his famous candy spills, for example, the sweets can be eaten by the viewer, and the piece, ultimately a metaphor for the transitoriness of the human being, gradually disappears.
We are very pleased to be able to offer a reprint of the catalogue that accompanied the artist’s major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1995. Nancy Spector reviews Gonzalez-Torres’s artistic career, taking a look at his work in the context of art production of the 1980s, while the individual chapters are devoted to central themes of his oeuvre.