LONDON.- Andrea Rosen Gallery,
Hauser & Wirth and Massimo De Carlo announced a three-part exhibition of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Curated by artists Julie Ault and Roni Horn, the exhibition is on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; Massimo De Carlo, Milan; and Hauser & Wirth, London in May, June, and July 2016. This exhibition is the first solo presentation of the artists work in Milan since an exhibition at Massimo De Carlo in 1991 and the first in London since the artists 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-Torress work with artists including Joseph Kosuth, Agnes Martin, On Kawara and Roni Horn and this is the first solo show at the gallery since 2000.
Each venue of the exhibition focuses on a dialogue within an essential body of Gonzalez-Torress 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-Torress work, every exhibition provides the opportunity for a more expansive, complex conceptualisation of the artists 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-Torress 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-Torress 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-Torress work.
The failure of conceptual art is actually its success. Because we, in the next generation, took those strategies and didnt 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 cant make it better), but you make it in a way that makes sense. Like the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard by Borges; its exactly the same thing but its better because its right now. It was written with a history of now
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, interview with Robert Storr, ArtPress, 1995