No Title

1992 - Photography (Photography)

5 x 7 inches

Félix González-Torres

location: New York, New York
year born: 1958
gender: male
nationality: American
home town: Guáimaro, Cuba

Behind the simplicity and beauty of this untitled photograph of a brilliantly-colored flowerbed by Félix González-Torres are two remarkable stories of love, loss, and resilience. As with most of his works, the photograph is untitled followed by a parenthesis that provides some context clues. In this case, an inscription on the reverse of the photograph reads: For Laura (Alice B. Toklas + Gertrude Stein Flower Bed in Paris). Alice B. Toklas moved to Paris in 1906, leaving San Francisco after its devastating earthquake. She met Gertrude Stein the day after she arrived in Paris, and they remained life partners until Stein’s death forty years later. The couple was known as an integral facet of the Parisian avant-garde, hosting figures such as Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and Hemingway. Stein wrote. Taken four years before González-Torres passed away due to AIDS in 1996, this photograph is at once an homage to the couple’s story of love, their strength and resilience, as well as a deeply personal mediation on his own experience of love and loss. This romantic and wistfully melancholic work documents the historical precedent for influential, openly gay culture makers, and is an homage to their memory and significance.


Felix Gonzalez-Torres is known for taking everyday objects and situations and imbuing them with powerful new meanings. Although his formal language echoes Minimal and Conceptual art, the striking visual simplicity and beauty of his installations operate as vehicles to lure audiences, allowing him to incorporate deeply personal narratives, and more broadly to serve humanistic ends by addressing themes relating to identity, gender, desire, love, and loss. Several pieces from his oeuvre relate to his experience as an openly gay man who experienced the devastating effects that the AIDS epidemic in the US had on the queer community. The celebrated works Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1991), consisting of two store-bought wall clocks ticking next to each other, and Untitled (1991), a billboard with the image of an empty, unmade bed—are both examples of deeply personal responses to the passing of his long-time partner, Ross Laycock, from AIDS.


Colors:



Susan Sontag
© » KADIST

Peter Hujar

1975

Susan Sontag, the author of On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others, was captured through Hujar’s now-iconic photograph in a relaxed yet pensive pose...

Amantes (Lovers)
© » KADIST

Juan Carlos Alom

2012

In Amantes (Lovers) Juan Carlos points his lens at his own environment, his underground (literally) studio in Havana...

Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California
© » KADIST

Sharon Lockhart

2011

Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California results from Lockhart’s prolonged investigation of an agricultural center and community...

Untitled
© » KADIST

Mark Bradford

2012

This untitled work from 2012 is a print originally made as part of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s artist limited edition series...

Rainbow Body
© » KADIST

Chitra Ganesh

2018

The title of Rainbow Body by Chitra Ganesh refers to an elevated state of, or metaphor for, the consciousness transformation known as a rainbow body...

This Exhibition
© » KADIST

Tino Sehgal

2004

Tino Sehgal’s This Exhibition requires an interpreter (in this particular piece, a gallery attendant) to faux faint each and every time a visitor enters into a given space...

Untitled (City Limits)
© » KADIST

Allen Ruppersberg

1970

Untitled (City Limits) is a series of five black-and-white photographs of road signs, specifically the signs demarcating city limits of several small towns in California...

Sultana's Dream
© » KADIST

Chitra Ganesh

2018

Art of War 1, City in Broad Daylight, Leaving the House, Justice is a Virtue, and Lions are Stronger than Men are linocut prints from the series Sultana’s Dream ...

Herculine's Profecy
© » KADIST

Juliana Huxtable

2017

Herculine’s Prophecy by Juliana Huxtable features a kneeling demon-figure on what appears to be a screen-print, placed on a wooden table, which has then been photographed and digitally altered to appear like a book cover, with a title and subtitle across the top, and a poem written across the bottom...

Work No. 299
© » KADIST

Martin Creed

2003

This photograph of Martin Creed himself was used as the invitation card for a fundraising auction of works on paper at Christie’s South Kensington in support of Camden Arts Centre’s first year in a refurbished building in 2005...

One Must
© » KADIST

John Baldessari

1997

In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text...

Condition Report
© » KADIST

Glenn Ligon

2000

Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...

20 Surrogates
© » KADIST

Allan McCollum

1982

In the work titled The Glossies (1980), an affinity for photography manifested itself before McCollum actually began to use photography as a medium...

Frontier-Linear
© » KADIST

Doug Aitken

2009

The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...

Slow Graffiti
© » KADIST

Alex Da Corte

2017

Slow Graffiti was produced for Da Corte’s exhibition at the Vienna Secession in 2017...

Lowrider Builder and Child
© » KADIST

Liz Cohen

2012

The photographic work Lowrider Builder and Child is a companion piece to the video Hydroforce , which features Cohen in the late stage of her pregnancy posing atop a German car that she transformed into a lowrider in a period of ten years...

Scene I am Cuba
© » KADIST

Felipe Dulzaides

2006

I Am Cuba— “Soy Cuba” in Spanish; “Ya Kuba” in Russian—is a Soviet/Cuban film produced in 1964 by director Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm...