The title of the exhibition is drawn from a poignant line in an essay by poet Elizabeth Bishop, which Gonzalez-Torres famously faxed to his gallerist, Andrea Rosen, in 1994. The Spaces Between will bring together more than forty works spanning a wide range of mediums, including installation, sculpture, photography, painting, and video. Rather than confining these pieces to the museum’s modern and contemporary wing, curators have chosen to disperse the works throughout fourteen of The Met’s permanent collection galleries. By integrating Gonzalez-Torres’s creations directly into historical rooms, the museum aims to place the late artist’s work in direct conversation with five millennia of human creativity, as noted by museum director and CEO Max Hollein in a press statement.
The exhibition will feature several signature works from the late 1980s and early 1990s that encapsulate Gonzalez-Torres’s politically charged and deeply personal conceptual practice. His art famously revolved around the transformation of desire, love, and personal loss against the backdrop of the widespread tragedies, state neglect, and early deaths brought on by the devastating AIDS epidemic.
Among the high-profile highlights is Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) from 1991. In this striking installation, a light-blue platform bounded by 48 glowing lightbulbs is activated once a day by a dancer wearing only silver lamé briefs, tube socks, and sneakers. The piece hovers precariously somewhere between an elegy for the communities of gay men wiped out during the early, dark years of the AIDS crisis and a captivating spectacle that seduces its viewers.
Other works in the exhibition convey an inescapable and enduring grief. These include Untitled (Perfect Lovers), created between 1987 and 1990, which consists of a pair of identical battery-operated clocks hung side by side, ultimately destined to fall out of sync as their batteries wear down at marginally different rates. Also featured is the candy pile sculpture Untitled (Revenge) from 1991, which echoes his famous 175-pound candy sculptural portrait dedicated to his partner, Ross Laycock, who died from an AIDS-related illness in 1991. Viewers are traditionally invited to take a piece of candy from these installations, allowing the sculptures to physically diminish over time, a metaphor for wasting away and depletion that resonates deeply with the losses of the era.
David Breslin, The Met’s modern and contemporary art curator in charge of the project, emphasized the dual nature of the artist’s output. Felix Gonzalez-Torres made a history-changing body of work that never chose between the personal and the political, maintaining a balance between the piercingly direct and the generously enigmatic, Breslin noted. The AIDS crisis served as the crucible that forged his resolute conceptual clarity, and his brilliance lay in creating an open-ended body of work where new, contemporary meanings can continuously be embedded into historical ones.
While the inherent openness of Gonzalez-Torres’s work has historically been a source of its remarkable longevity and adaptability, it has also occasionally left the door open for curatorial interpretations that have sparked public controversy and pushback. This friction was notably highlighted in 2022, when the Art Institute of Chicago reinstalled Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) from 1991 accompanied by a new wall label that omitted any explicit mention of AIDS or the artist’s deceased lover, Ross Laycock, choosing instead to focus primarily on the work’s formal and aesthetic merits. Similarly, in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and amid rising waves of anti-Asian violence, some cultural critics questioned the decision by David Zwirner gallery and Andrea Rosen to stage a buzzy, highly social-media-friendly restaging of Gonzalez-Torres’s 1990 work Untitled (Fortune Cookie Corner).
Gonzalez-Torres’s formal and aesthetic contributions to conceptual art have been celebrated through major solo exhibitions around the world, most recently at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. However, much like the work of his peers—including artists such as Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Carrie Mae Weems, and Hans Haacke, alongside whom he collaborated within the influential Group Material collective in the late 1980s and early 1990s—formal aesthetics were entirely inseparable from politics for Gonzalez-Torres. He famously articulated this philosophy to fellow artist Ross Bleckner in a 1993 interview, asserting that there is never such a thing as an apolitical or inert artwork.
That ongoing aversion to artistic fixity and rigid categorization appears to be at the conceptual center of The Spaces Between. Within the galleries of The Met, Gonzalez-Torres’s work will be situated simultaneously as a historical document of a specific, painful era and as an offering that continually opens itself to new resonances and interpretations for modern audiences.
Presenting the exhibition across The Met and its diverse departments provides a unique opportunity to witness what binds humanity together across vast expanses of time, while simultaneously highlighting what fixes each individual firmly within their own present moment, Breslin observed.
