Félix

Collecteurs and the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Family Archive proudly present Félix.

Drawing from pivotal and never-before-seen works and material from the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Family Archive, this digital exhibition takes place on Collecteurs’ website and social media. A conversation with Felix’s sister, Gloria Gonzalez-Torres, is presented to provide unique insight into Felix’s early environment. You’ll also find essays addressing the constructs of private versus public, one of the topics most relevant to the artist’s multidimensional practice.

The exhibition coincides with Felix’s birthday, November 26, and will unfold over the course of two weeks, with new content made available on Collecteurs’ website throughout the exhibition and shared with millions worldwide.

In keeping with the late artist’s focus on generosity, the digital exhibition also kicks off two social campaigns: First, Instagram users are invited to capture images of the sky, geotag them, then tag @collecteurs and @felixgonzaleztorresarchive along with #felixexhibition to be featured in Collecteurs’ Instagram Stories. The second social campaign encourages people to sign up via the Collecteurs website to receive a postcard featuring one of Felix’s photos from the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Family Archive.

Felix once said, “[My work] is all my personal history, all that stuff… gender and sexual preference… I can’t separate my art from my life.” In striking this intimate note, then, the exhibition’s aim is not to limit our perception of Gonzalez-Torres and his work, but rather to ground it in reality. The goal is to begin with the artist’s own story about his origins. It is also to emphasize what is really at issue here: the importance of family in the preservation of an artist’s legacy, and the context such archival material can lend to an artist’s life and work.

“Much of Gonzalez-Torres’s art questions what we mean when we describe things as ‘private’ or as ‘public,’” wrote Anne Umland in her 1992 essay for MoMA Projects. Indeed, the exhibition focuses not on the private revelations—of personal history and sexual preference—but on what happens to such revelations when they are placed in a public context.

Félix (2020) is a self-reflexive exhibition that exposes traces of his life, the memories of his family, and the death of his partner Ross Laycock—using the archival format to mirror his artistic process of generosity by offering information and documents in digital form. This exhibition is necessary because his life and work are inextricable from each other, and the traces he left behind perform an extension of each project. If Gonzalez-Torres uses his own personal archive as source material for his works, this exhibition proposes a deeper understanding of his biography as a method of approaching his original intention.

The exhibition is hosted in the digital realm, in keeping with Collecteurs’ mission of giving the public access to previously unseen artworks. We believe this emphasis on keeping art in the eyes of the public, having as many people experience it as possible, is also very much in line with what Felix Gonzalez-Torres sought to do through his work as an artist.

Félix is made possible by the contributions of Natalia Grabowska, Assistant Curator at Serpentine Galleries; Pietro Rigolo, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Collections at The Getty Research Institute; and independent curator, Àngels Miralda.

“The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Family Archive is honored to present Félix alongside Collecteurs, whose mission emphasizes the importance of sharing and democratization of art by increasing access to artworks and materials otherwise stored or archived, and therefore aligns with our very own. We hope this project highlights the crucial role of families in preserving and contextualizing an artist’s legacy and encourages other families to bring to light unique insight, thus widening our understanding of more artists and their legacies.”

Mario M. Gonzalez

Director, Felix Gonzalez-Torres Family Archive

About Collecteurs

Developed at the New Museum’s cultural incubator, Collecteurs is a public-benefit corporation on a mission to give the public access to private art collections. As a digital museum, the platform empowers collectors, making it easy for them to digitize, manage, and exhibit their collections without needing the capital to open a private museum.

About the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Family Archive

The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Family Archive was established in 2020 in order to enhance the artistic and personal legacy of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The Archive supports curators, writers, researchers, and institutions by facilitating access to the family’s archive. The Archive serves as the official resource for research regarding Felix’s personal life.

In the first installment of our digital exhibition Félix, Collecteurs speaks with Félix González-Torres’s older sister, Gloria González-Torres, about the artist’s early days. Reminiscing about a childhood spent exploring mischief and creativity, Gloria also shares intimate details of what it was like for her and young Félix to leave post-revolution Cuba and travel to Spain in 1970.

Àngels Miralda explores how Félix González-Torres masterfully fused the private and the public by using his personal archive to take on societal issues such as censorship in works that form what could be called a “queer cartographic archive.”

Félix González-Torres’ heartfelt account of bidding farewell to his older brother Mario as Félix and his sister Gloria flew to Madrid in January 1970, written nine years after the brothers had last seen one another.

Pietro Rigolo surveys Félix’s body of work in search of themes embedded in his art—like the serenity of the color blue and the artist’s preoccupation with poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s concept of “blood memory.”

Take a peek at some of Félix González-Torres’s most cherished moments of privacy as Natalia Grabowska delves into the sense of tenderness evoked by the artist’s candid snapshots.

Félix González-Torres was best known for having created works that explore the fine line between what is “private” and what is “public”—works that often tackle social issues within a subtle, rather conceptual framework of objects, drawings, and photographs. He was adamant about channeling his private passions—for his partner Ross, for social issues affecting his milieu, even for household cats—to communicate a larger, more pervasive message of unity and wholeness for the public. Although a large part of his artistic archive has been available to the masses for some time, there were equally compelling, never-before-seen snapshots from Félix’s childhood and adolescence in the González-Torres Family’s archives.

We are proud to have collaborated with the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Family Archive to host this exhibition on Collecteurs, as we believe these snapshots provide glimpses into Félix’s early preoccupations that would go on to inform and inspire some of his most memorable works. 

We also wanted to highlight and celebrate the crucial role a family archive plays in preserving an artist’s legacy—again, our aim was to lay bare the artist’s full legacy, without whitewashing or glossing over parts of his identity that were essential for creating the way he did, parts of his life that continue to provide much-needed context for his works, decades later.

Indeed, decades later, we still admire Félix’s boldness in managing to infiltrate institutions, as both an immigrant and a gay man, during the time he was alive—a time that was marred by prevailingly oppressive attitudes regarding homosexuality and the AIDS crisis, the latter often mentioned in barely audible whispers outside of the LGBTQ+ community. It was only after Félix infiltrated the institution that the public was able to glean the underlying messages in his works.

Given how perfectly Félix’s focus on making his art accessible to the public ties into our mission of doing the same for private collections, we welcomed the public to contribute to the exhibition by participating in a social campaign where they could capture an image of the sky, post it to Instagram with a geotag, and share it with the world using the tags #felixexhibition, @collecteurs, and @felixgonzaleztorresfamilyarchive. Check out our GIF featuring some of the images you all shared!