Beaver College Art Gallery and The Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, are presenting concurrent exhibitions by New York artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres. In his elegant, often ephemeral art, Gonzalez-Torres manipulates and combines characteristics of sculpture, photography, printmaking, and performance in his work. He employs a spare aesthetic that is indebted to minimalism and conceptualism but is nonetheless infused with emotional and socio-political content. Themes of love and loss predominate in his work, along with critical, ironic examinations of power and notions of virility.
Gonzalez-Torres is perhaps known best for his instalations of immense quantities of individually wrapped candy heaped in the coners of rooms or spread out on the floor. These candy piles recall the corner works of Robert Smithson and the scatter pieces of Robert Morris. They exhibit formal beauty while embodying the notion of an artwork as an object of literal consumption and gratifacation. The artist often invites the viewer to take a peice of candy away with them, in part as an effort to undermine the idea of exclusive ownership and alter the elevated status of the art object. The conventional notion of originality is also called into question by Gonzalez-Torres' works as many of them can be recreated to exist simultaneously in various places. Generous and democratic in his approach, the artist wishes to "give information and meaning back to the people," through his artworks.
The two concurrent exhibitions contrast themes of love and war. At Beaver College, Gonzalez-forres is exhibiting Untitled (Public Opinion), comprised of 900 pounds of foil-wrapped, black licorice rods. This work, part of the permanent collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, was created during the Gulf War and alludes to the manner in which 'public opinion' was manipulated by the government and the media during that conflict. Also on view are three of his Untitled 'date' peices-- lists of intersecting public and private events-- and an early collage contrasting Cuban and American cultures. Additional works including draperies, mirrors lights and another candy pile can be seen at the Fabric Workshop, 1315 Cherry Street Philadelphia, through March.
Born in Cuba 1957, Gonzalez-Torres studied at Pratt Institute, graduated from the Whitney Independent Study Program and received an MFA from the New York University. He is the recipient of two artist's fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pollock Krasner grant, and a DAAD Artist-in-Residence grant. Represented in New York by the Andrea Rosen Gallery, he has exhibited internationally with solo shows in Paris, Stockholm, Vienna, and Milan. He has been involved in numerous group exhibitions, including the 1991 Whitney Biennial and a recent three-person show with Ad Reinhardt and Joseph Kosuth at the Camden Arts Centre, London. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has also acquired and installed a recent work of Gonzalez-Torres.