ExhibitionApril 8, 2021
Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Politics of Relation
MACBA presents a major solo exhibition of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work (American, Born Cuba, 1957-died in Miami, 1996), curated by Tanya Barson, and will be on view until September 12th, 2021. The exhibition continues in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion*, the façade of L’Auditori de Barcelona, Rambla del Raval, and other spaces around the city until April 12th.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Politics of Relation establishes the artist’s work within the postcolonial discourse and the connected histories between Spain and the Americas, especially questions around memory, authority, freedom, and national identity. A particular emphasis is placed on reading Gonzalez-Torres’s work with Spanish, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, not as a simple, singular biographical narrative. The show proposes various interpretations highlighting the work’s formative influence on queer aesthetics.
It brings together approximately 40 works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres organized into four galleries; the first addresses the broad politics of Gonzalez-Torres’s practice related to ideas of authority, judgment, and memory. The second considers ideas of coupling, touching, doubling, and sameness, at equilibrium, love, and the dialogue between mutability and eternity. The third is organized around the artist’s most existentially oriented works, addressing themes of travel, emigration, exile, tourism, and escape/freedom and foregrounds imagery of the beach, water, and the sky, which function as expansive poetic metaphors within his work. The fourth examines and connects the ideas of patriotism, militarism, machismo, and homoerotic desire.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Politics of Relation establishes the artist’s work within the postcolonial discourse and the connected histories between Spain and the Americas, especially questions around memory, authority, freedom, and national identity. A particular emphasis is placed on reading Gonzalez-Torres’s work with Spanish, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, not as a simple, singular biographical narrative. The show proposes various interpretations highlighting the work’s formative influence on queer aesthetics.
It brings together approximately 40 works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres organized into four galleries; the first addresses the broad politics of Gonzalez-Torres’s practice related to ideas of authority, judgment, and memory. The second considers ideas of coupling, touching, doubling, and sameness, at equilibrium, love, and the dialogue between mutability and eternity. The third is organized around the artist’s most existentially oriented works, addressing themes of travel, emigration, exile, tourism, and escape/freedom and foregrounds imagery of the beach, water, and the sky, which function as expansive poetic metaphors within his work. The fourth examines and connects the ideas of patriotism, militarism, machismo, and homoerotic desire.
Gallery
