No Title

1992 - Photography (Photography)
5 x 7 inches

Félix González-Torres

year born: 1958

gender: male

nationality: American

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.