Large-Scale Installation by Felix Gonzalez-Torres to Go On View at Dia Beacon
Exhibition marks major acquisition and brings Gonzalez-Torres’s work to Dia Beacon for the first time
New York, New York, April 3, 2024 – Opening on April 5, 2024, at Dia Beacon, a presentation of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (Loverboy) (1989), which recently entered the permanent collection, marks the artist’s first acquisition and solo exhibition at Dia.
Manifested anew with each iteration, the work consists of common light-blue curtains which, here, have been sourced by Dia and installed along the linear expanse of the east gallery. Draping Robert Irwin–designed windows featuring shifting glazes, “Untitled” (Loverboy) emphasizes the existing architectural tension between transparency and opacity. It infiltrates the institutional space as a seemingly innocuous extension of its interior architecture and embodies the productive liminality Gonzalez-Torres embraced throughout his practice and identity, refusing fixed meanings and categories and unfolding at the intersection of private and public, interior and exterior, and domestic and institutional. Contending with art-historical influence and lived experience, the work bridges the formal vocabulary of Postminimalism with the charged language of interiors. “Untitled” (Loverboy) is responsive to its immediate environment and takes on a corporeality and relationality in concert with shifting atmospheric conditions.
“Introducing this major new acquisition by Felix Gonzalez-Torres to the galleries at Dia Beacon amplifies the political, sentimental, and poetic connotations he identified as intrinsic to the work of his Minimal and Conceptual forebearers, some on view in close proximity,” said Jordan Carter, curator and co–department head, and Humberto Moro, deputy director of program. “The long-overdue presence of Gonzalez-Torres’s work in Dia’s collection and exhibition program introduces a queer politics and sensibility, following the threads of the artist’s first interactions with Dia in the late 1980s through his work with Group Material which productively challenged Dia’s mission.”
Gonzalez-Torres questioned authoritative and hegemonic structures throughout his practice, embodying a radical approach to authorship, ownership, originality, and value in series informally known as the “Billboards,” “Candy Works,” “Curtains,” “Light Strings,” and “Paper Stacks,” among others. Working with diffuse, prosaic materials, Gonzalez-Torres consistently cultivated the possibility of change and multiplicity, staging relations “[between] public and private, between personal and social, between the fear of loss and the joy of loving, of growing, of changing, of always becoming more, of losing oneself slowly and then being replenished all over again from scratch.”
While the presentation of “Untitled” (Loverboy) will mark the artist’s first exhibition at Dia, Gonzalez-Torres is embedded within the programmatic and discursive history of the institution. Gonzalez-Torres was a member of Group Material, an artist collective devoted to political activism and social engagement, which organized the exhibition Democracy that took place in Dia’s SoHo spaces over a period of four months from 1988 to 1989. The collective—then composed of Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, and Gonzalez-Torres—understood the exhibition model as a critical tool to mobilize social movements and accommodate activist interventions, where dominant social systems could be questioned and subverted. Democracy took the format of an open forum aimed at identifying the critical failures of U.S. democracy at the time, which the collective divided into four subgroups: education, electoral politics, cultural participation, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres is organized by Jordan Carter, curator and co–department head, and Humberto Moro, deputy director of program, with Liv Cuniberti, curatorial assistant.
All exhibitions at Dia are made possible by the Economou Exhibition Fund.
About Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Felix Gonzalez-Torres was an American artist who was born in Guáimaro, Cuba, in 1957. Embracing the fugitivity of his work in relation to biography and identity, Gonzalez-Torres built upon histories and methodologies associated with Minimal, Postminimal, and Conceptual art, infusing these legacies with a personal and political dimension to address charged themes including the public and private, love and loss, gender and sexuality, and time and change, as well as the precarious conditions of life and identity in the late 20th-century. In 1979, he moved to New York where he received his BFA in photography from Pratt Institute in 1983; attended the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in both 1981 and 1983; and earned his MFA from the International Center of Photography and New York University in 1987. Through 1991, Gonzalez-Torres was a member of Group Material, an artist collective devoted to political activism and social engagement, whose four-part exhibition and public forum Democracy unfolded from 1988 to 1989 at Dia’s SoHo spaces. In 1994, a major survey of his work, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Traveling, was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. A year later, in 1995, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presented the survey Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which travelled to Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris. Following his death in 1996, Gonzalez-Torres has been, and continues to be, the subject of numerous major exhibitions and surveys including at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (1998); El Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo, Uruguay (2000–01); and Serpentine Gallery, London (2000). In 2007, Gonzalez-Torres was the second artist to posthumously represent the United States at the 52nd Venice Biennale. From 2010 to 2011, a six-part retrospective, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form, was organized by the WIELS Contemporary Art Center, Brussels, and travelled to the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt. More recently, his work has been presented at institutions including Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2022); and in a two-person exhibition alongside Roni Horn at the Bourse de Commerce–Pinault Collection, Paris (2022). He died in Miami in 1996.
About Dia Art Foundation
Taking its name from the Greek word meaning “through,” Dia was established in 1974 with the mission to serve as a conduit for artists to realize ambitious new projects, unmediated by overt interpretation and uncurbed by the limitations of more traditional museums and galleries. Dia’s programming fosters contemplative and sustained consideration of a single artist’s body of work and its collection is distinguished by the deep and longstanding relationships that the nonprofit has cultivated with artists whose work came to prominence particularly in the 1960s and ’70s.
In addition to Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, and Dia Chelsea, Dia maintains and operates a constellation of commissions, long-term installations, and site-specific projects, notably focused on Land art, nationally and internationally. These include:
Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), and Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, inaugurated in 1982 and ongoing), all located in New York
De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977), in western New Mexico
Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), in the Great Salt Lake, Utah
Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76), in the Great Basin Desert, Utah
De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), in Kassel, Germany
Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation (2018)
For additional information or materials, contact:
(U.S. press inquiries)
Hannah Gompertz, Dia Art Foundation, hgompertz@diaart.org, +1 212 293 5598
Melissa Parsoff, Parsoff Communications, mparsoff@parsoff-communications.com, +1 516 445 5899
(International press inquiries)
Sam Talbot, sam@sam-talbot.com, +44 (0) 772 5184 630