Felix Gonzalez-Torres
“Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991
At an undisclosed time, a lamé-clad go-go dancer ascends a light blue platform with a personal listening device. Surrounded by 48 illuminated lightbulbs, listening to music of their own choosing, they dance for approximately five minutes before disappearing again.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ iconic ‘‘Untitled’ (Go-Go Dancing Platform)’ (1991) will be presented by the gallery at Art Basel Unlimited 2025.
Conceived of just months after the artist’s partner, Ross Laycock, died of AIDS, followed by the death of the artist’s father, “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1991) was made during a moment of profound personal loss and against a backdrop of widespread homophobia, yet offers moments of joy and desire.
Much of Gonzalez-Torres’s work addresses ideas of performativity, and the absence of a body on the platform is as profound as when a dancer is fleetingly present. The conceptual openness and contemporary resonance of his work fosters active engagement, encouraging viewers to make their own associative connections.
‘It reminds us that beauty can be ephemeral, that performance can be a private act and that care like memory requires effort.’ - Humberto Moro
One of the artist’s most seminal works, ‘“Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform)’ has been shown in more than 30 exhibitions around the globe, including at the Centre Pompidou, Serpentine Gallery, Fondation Beyeler, and the Hammer Museum. It epitomizes Gonzalez-Torres’s most important contributions to the canon of art history.
‘This artist was an aesthetic who, by wielding the power of seductive beauty and the poetic pain of impermanence, sought to weld the feelings of a generation growing up in the shadow of AIDS with his provocative social commentary.’
About the artist
Felix Gonzalez-Torres (born 1957 in Guáimaro, Cuba; died 1996 in Miami) was one of the most influential artists to emerge from the vibrant New York art scene of the 1980s and 1990s. He developed his profoundly personal, deeply political, and conceptually rigorous practice under the shadow of the AIDS epidemic and in the aftermath of Minimalism and Conceptualism.