Co-organized with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, this is the first major American museum presentation of the work of Gonzalez-Torres, a Cuban-born artist now living and working in New York. Over the last decade he has dealt with the severe tradition and vocabulary of 1960s Minimalism through more personal notions of the body, illness, and loss. His first-hand experiences with the devastation brought by AIDS has lent his work a profound sense of mourning and loss. His “endless” stacks of paper—some with images screened onto them, others a pale hospital blue—are free for the taking, providing a keepsake for the viewer and symbolizing an endless cycle of depletion and restoration for the artwork, the body, the artist. Gonzalez-Torres’s candy pieces are similarly sweet and sad eulogies that consist of piles of individually wrapped chocolates or hard candies that exactly match the artist’s or his lover’s body weight and which are gradually consumed by the gallery’s visitors. His exhibition at the Society combines four previously-made sculptures with several new, site-specific pieces.
