“Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work never feels historical, per se, because it’s always sort of living,” says Andrea Rosen of the late installation artist, who had the inaugural show at her New York gallery in January 1990, six years before his death from AIDS-related causes. “He is probably the most influential person in my life, and the backbone of the philosophical mission of my gallery.” On May 5 Rosen will open one part of an international three-venue exhibition celebrating the artist, along with Massimo De Carlo in Milan, on May 20, and Hauser & Wirth in London, beginning May 26. As Rosen points out, “one aspect of Gonzalez-Torres’s work is that, by nature, it’s constantly reinventing itself. Whoever installs it has the freedom to make decisions about the work that can alter it.” In this case, Julie Ault and Roni Horn—“probably the two artists closest to Felix in his lifetime,” says Rosen, noting his involvement in Group Material alongside Ault and his intense artistic dialogue with Horn, the subject of a 2005 show at Rosen’s gallery—were tasked with curating across the trio of spaces. For this show, Rosen will display a number of his text-based portraits, which portray their subjects through a timeline of events written on the wall. The gallerist notes that as new scholarship emerges around Gonzalez-Torres’s brief but potent career, the issue at hand becomes, in some sense, how to be more open-ended in curatorial and academic approaches to his work: “It always feels like we’re at the tip of the iceberg with Felix.”
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