Reviews

The MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main hosts the final stop of the traveling retrospective "Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Specific Objects without Specific Form", previously shown in Brussels and in Basel. The show Includes both rarely seen and more known paintings, sculptures, photographic works, and public projects and reflects the full scope of Gonzalez-Torres's short but prolific career. The artist was born in Cuba and settled in New York in the late 1970s where he studied art and began his practice as an artist before his untimely death of AIDS related complications in 1996 at only thirty-eight years old. He participated in the art collective Group Material in the 1980s, was an engaged social activist, and in a relatively short time developed a profoundly influential body of work that can be seen in critical relationship to Conceptual Art and Minimalism, mixing political critique, emotional affect, and deep formal concerns in a wide range of media, including drawings, sculpture, and public billboards, often using ordinary objects as a starting point (such as cocks, mirrors, or light fixtures). His piles of candy and paper stacks from which viewers are allowed to take away a piece are amongst his most famous artworks. One particularity of this travelling show is that at each of the stages of the exhibition tour, the show is initially installed by the exhibition curator Elena Filipovic and halfway through its duration is completely reinstalled by a different selected artist whose own practice has been influenced by Gonzalez-Torres. In the case of the MMK show, Tino Sehgal was in charge of reinstalling and as a result, a special "choreography" was projected so that daily changes can be enacted to the presentation of Gonzalez-Torres's artworks.