Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York (ARG# GF 1991-83)
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1992

Mexico City, Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporáneo, Selecciones de la colección permanente, October 1992 - January 1993
Venice Biennale, Aperto 93, June - October 1993, p. 291, illustrated in color
New York, Americas Society Art Gallery; Miami, Center for Fine Arts, Space of Time: Contemporary Art from the Americas/Espacio del Tiempo: Arte Contemporáneo de las Américas, September 1993 - January 1994, pp. 62 and 76, illustrated
e Contemporáneo, 1995 - 1996 (temporary loan)
Mexico City, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Foro Septiembre: Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Acto de Presencia, September - November 1998
Munich, Kunstlerwerkstatt, Sillehalten [Keeping the Stillness]: Richard Basquié, Olafur Eliasson, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Iris Haüssler, October - December 1998, pp. 28 and 30, illustrated
Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Munich, Haus der Kunst, Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century, October 1999 - April 2000, p. 179, illustrated in color
Frankfurt am Main, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Change of Scene XVIII: Paare [Couples]: Gilbert & George and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, September 2000- March 2001, pp. 36-37, illustrated and pp. 50 and 52 (illustrated)
Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Versiones del Dur: F[r]icciones, December 2000 - March 2001, pp. 44-45, illustrated
Dallas, Dallas Museum of Art, Gonzalez-Torres/Joseph Beuys, February - May 2001
Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum, The Inward Eye: Transcendence in Contemporary Art, December 2001 - February 2002, frontispiece, illustrated and pp. 21 and 43, illustrated
São Paulo, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; Recife, Centro de Convenciones de Pernambucol Caracas, Museo Sofia Imber; Mexico City, Museo Carillo Gil, Museo de Arte Moderno; Buenos Aires, Museo de Arte Linoamericao de Beunos Aries (MALBA) - Colleción Constantini; San Juan, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico; Chicago, Chicago Cultural Center; Valencia, Atarazanas, Politicas de la diferencia: Arte Iberoamericano fin de siglo [Politics of Difference: Ibero-American Art at the End of the Century, March 2001 - November 2002
Toronto, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art and the Art Gallery of York University, Regarding Landscape, May - June 2002
Puebla, Galería de Arte Contemporáneo y Diseño, Amarga belleza, April - June 2004
Mexico City, Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte, Morir de Amor: Permanencia Voluntaria, April - July 2005, pp. 25 and 145
Berlin, Hamburger Banhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, October 2006 - January 2007, pp. 135-139, illustrated
Montreal, Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts (temporary loan)
Cambridge, Harvard University, November 2007 - January 2008 (temporary loan)
Vigo, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo; San Sebastian, Koldo Mitxelena, El Medio es el Museo [The Museum as Medium], June 2008 - January 2009
Mexico City, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Somewhere/Nowhere, February - May 2010, p. 70, illustrated

Nancy Princethal, "Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Multiple Choice," Art + Text, May 1994, p. 41, illustrated
Susan Morgan, "Private Messages," Elle, February 1995, p. 62, illustrated
Monica Amor, "Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Towards a Postmodern Sublimity," Third Text, Spring 1995, p. 68, illustrated
Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1995, p. 67, illustrated
Robert Storr, "Setting Traps for the Mind and Heart," Art in America, January 1996, p. 74, illustrated
Markus Frehrking, "R.I.P. Felix Gonzalez-Torres 1957 - 1996," Pakt, April - June 1996, p. 4, illustrated
Sara Maneíro Montiel, "La Huella como Metaforo. Felix Gonzalez-Torres 1957-1996," Estilo, April/May 1996, p. 51, illustrated
Dietmar Elger, Felix Gonzalez-Torres Catalogue Raisonné, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1997, cat. no. 183, p. 96, illustrated
Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, London, 2011, p. 396, illustrated

This work is in excellent condition and a new stack has been printed for the Sotheby's exhibition per the specifications of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation indicated below. As cited in the catalogue, the owner is an integral part of this work and it is the artist's intention that a new Certificate of Authenticity and Ownership is issued stating the new owner's name, in addition to the current Certificate of Authenticity and Ownership which accompanies this work. The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation will provide this new certificate at no charge. Regarding future printing of the work: The original paper specified by the artist was Off White Bond by Papel Mex, 72 grs. Per the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, if the exact paper is not available, a similar paper may be used. In the past they have recommended a white offset paper (either 75 or 80 lb in weight). The ideal dimensions of the paper are 28 1/2 x 43 inches. It was determined this was the best ratio in the US to the original photo crop marks that Felix specified in the original printing of 72 x 109 cm. The ideal height of the stack is 8 inches, which is roughly 2,600 sheets at the specified paper weight. Each sheet from the stack is white paper that has been offset printed with an image of clouds in the sky that bleeds to the edge on all four sides. The digital file that accompanies the work indicates the appropriate crop marks.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Among the most stunning of all Felix Gonzalez-Torres' paper stacks, the aptly named "Untitled"(Aparición), reproduces an achingly beautiful image of the celestial heavens. Rendered upon hundreds of sheets of transitory paper, the work collapses the boundaries of traditional and static sculpture. To acquire the work is in itself a benevolent practice. With its acquisition, one simultaneously agrees to pass it along to others during its display, since sheets are intended to be taken away by the privileged viewers. Aesthetically refined, Gonzalez-Torres' work allows for a profound mutability of meaning. In the poignant inclusiveness of works such as "Untitled"(Aparición), the artist subtly expands beyond any autobiographical references and erodes the boundaries between the personal and the political, the artist and the public. The participatory nature of the work compels the viewer to engage and disseminate the artist's vision and message of compassion. While Gonzalez-Torres would succumb to the AIDS virus in 1996, and the illness and subsequent death in 1991 of his lover, Ross was undoubtedly part of works such as "Untitled"(Aparición), they ultimately convey the more optimistic, positive, generous and inspiring layers of Gonzalez-Torres' practice.

"Untitled"(Aparición), from 1991, was made during a time when Felix Gonzalez-Torres created his most seminal and historic imagery, and one of the most important aspects of this particular work is its significant and essential relationship to the many bodies of Gonzalez-Torres' work that use the sky and sea as metaphors for transience, time and travel.  The imagery of this work relates directly to other significant and important works which feature the sky or birds in flight such as "Untitled" (1992/1993, Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). The birds appear throughout all of Gonzalez-Torres' major bodies of work which include his puzzles, photographs, billboards and stacks. The image is a reflection not only of the literal, transient nature of traveling from one place to the other, but more importantly captures the essence of a moment. Each moment in time can be a moment which transforms what comes after; one moment can transform time. This is one of the major concepts running through Felix's work and is perfectly captured in "Untitled"(Aparición).

In the same year as "Untitled" (Aparición), Gonzalez-Torres created twelve other paper stacks of endless copies, a structural and conceptual enterprise begun in 1988. Conceptually, the works are open-ended, a fact reflected in the specific form of the italicized and parenthetic titles which the artist purposely intended as a suggestion to the viewer that the work is open to their interpretation. Comprised of hundreds of sheets of paper reaching a maximum height of the artist's specification, the stack is in a constant state of flux, imbued with a life that is by design resilient and regenerative. All of the paper stacks are printed anew when loaned for exhibition, or replenished, and much of the fluctuation of the work is determined by the owner's or exhibitor's choice when manifesting the work. This, in itself, demonstrates how the work is regenerated and exists over time. As the artist stated in a 1993 interview with Tim Rollins, "They will always exist because they don't really exist or because they don't have to exist all the time.  They are usually fabricated for exhibition purposes and sometimes they are fabricated in different places at the same time.  After all, there is no original, only one original certificate of authenticity."

Poignant, romantic, and simultaneously melancholic, the imagery of "Untitled"(Aparición) was made in the same year as the conception of the most memorable of the artist's Billboards that was first seen the following year at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in a 1992 Projects exhibition. Untitled, 1991, a billboard depicting an unmade bed with the impression of two figures' heads still fresh on side-by-side pillows, was a provocative image suggestive of presence and absence that was also a work which navigated "the fine line between social commentary and deeply personal disclosure, equivocating between the two realms and obscuring the culturally determined distinctions that separate them." (Nancy Spector, "Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Travelogue," Parkett No. 39, 1994, p. 24).  "Untitled"(Aparición) with its beautiful chiaroscuro sky is spiritually metaphorical. While there is no false optimism in Gonzalez-Torres' lexicon of skies, light bulbs or piles of candy, there is an acceptance of a fate that will resurrect and renew, signified by the clouds giving way to light in "Untitled"(Aparición). Commenting on his work from that time, Gonzalez-Torres wrote, "[This work] constitutes a comment on the passing of time and the possibility of erasure or disappearance, which involves a poetics of space....[it] also touches upon life in its most radical definition, its limit: death. As with all artistic practices, it is related to the act of leaving one place for another, one which proves perhaps better than the first."  (Felix Gonzalez-Torres as quoted in Nancy Spector, "Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Travelogue," Parkett No. 39, 1994, p. 24).

The ability for stacks such as "Untitled"(Aparición) to live beyond the inherent "death" of their original structure is particularly relevant to the open-ended interpretations for "Untitled"(Aparición).  By definition an apparition is a ghostly existence made visible. Is each endless sheet an aching wish for the regenerative appearance of his lover? Is he willing him to appear? Or for Gonzalez-Torres, is the image of distant, fleeting clouds the present embodiment of his lover?  As Julie Ault observed of the artist's body of work, "Can the beautiful be sad? Is beauty inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning? Or else is the beautiful object the one that tirelessly returns following destructions and wars in order to bear witness that there is survival after death, that immortality is possible." (Julie Ault, ed., Felix Gonzalez Torres, New York, 2006, p. 57).