Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Three-part Exhibition at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; Massimo De Carlo, Milan; Hauser & Wirth London

Andrea Rosen Gallery, Hauser & Wirth and Massimo De Carlo are delighted to announce a three-part exhibition of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Curated by artists Julie Ault and Roni Horn, the exhibition will be on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; Massimo De Carlo, Milan; and Hauser & Wirth, London in May, June, and July 2016. This exhibition will be the first solo presentation of the artist’s work in Milan since an exhibition at Massimo De Carlo in 1991 and the first in London since the artist’s survey at the Serpentine Galleries in 2000. Over the last decade, Andrea Rosen Gallery has been dedicated to a series of two-person exhibitions situating Gonzalez-Torres’s work with artists including Joseph Kosuth, Agnes Martin, On Kawara and Roni Horn and this will be the first solo show at the gallery since 2000.

Each venue of the exhibition will focus on a dialogue within an essential body of Gonzalez-Torres’s oeuvre. The experience of each of the three venues is intended to be perceived as simultaneously autonomous and as one element of a whole. As curators take on the rights and responsibilities to make choices in and around the manifestation and installation of Gonzalez-Torres’s work, every exhibition provides the opportunity for a more expansive, complex conceptualisation of the artist’s practice rather than an attempt to present (or preserve) a singular concrete or ‘correct’ interpretation of the work. The profound nature of the curators’ specific choices may encourage viewers to project the other possibilities of exhibitions that the uniquely open and transformative nature of Gonzalez-Torres’s work allows.

Each curator of a Gonzalez-Torres exhibition, whether a new scholar or an old friend, is part of an ongoing trajectory of perspectives. The particular closeness of Ault and Horn to both the fluidity and specificity of Gonzalez-Torres’s working processes during his lifetime is an invaluable resource and contribution to the understanding of the range of methodologies, open-endedness and rigour of Gonzalez-Torres’s work.

‘The failure of conceptual art is actually its success. Because we, in the next generation, took those strategies and didn’t worry if it looked like art or not, that was their business... So I do believe in looking back and going through school reading books. You learn from these people. Then, hopefully, you try to make it, not better (because you can’t make it better), but you make it in a way that makes sense. Like the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard by Borges; it’s exactly the same thing but it’s better because it’s right now. It was written with a history of now…’ – Felix Gonzalez-Torres, interview with Robert Storr, ArtPress, 1995