Exceptional Works: Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996) is one of the most significant artists to have emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In its reduced formal vocabulary, conceptual rigor, and evocative use of everyday materials, the artist’s work resonates with meaning that is at once specific and mutable, rigorous and generous, poetic and political.
Gonzalez-Torres passed away from complications from AIDS.

Presented on the occasion of Art Basel 2025, "Untitled" (1989/1990) is one of the most significant of Gonzalez-Torres’s paper stacks, a pivotal and central body of work that encapsulates many of the defining qualities of the artist’s practice. “Untitled” is especially significant as it is the artist’s only double stack work—doubles being a poignant motif that recurs throughout Gonzalez-Torres’s oeuvre. The two phrases that appear on each of the respective stacks have become in some ways emblematic of Gonzalez-Torres and the ethos of his art: “Somewhere better than this place.” is printed on the sheets of one of the adjacent stacks, and on the other “Nowhere better than this place.” As Nancy Spector notes, these phrases “engender a feeling of ambiguity, one intimating a more desirable reality than the present situation, the other affirming that the present is the best and only place to be.”

While fine art print methods like lithography are usually perceived as rarified, Gonzalez-Torres’s stack works, which are technically also lithographs but printed commercially and referred to as “offset print on paper”—and whose parameters allow a viewer to choose to take sheets from the work—question ideas of value, stability, permanence, and ownership. The stack works also purposefully subvert the austerity of the minimalist form of the perfect cube into an object that is constantly shifting, even to the extent of having the ability to completely disappear and reappear.

“I want to stress that the formal aspects are very deliberate,” the artist noted of the stacks in a conversation in 1991. Writing on the spatial qualities of these works, the art historian Martha Buskirk has observed: “Like the minimalist objects that they resemble, Gonzalez-Torres’s stacks establish a relationship to the space of the gallery. Indeed, the geometric form could be described as a serial structure since it is constituted by multiple, identical, mechanically produced units. But the fact that these units are endlessly replaceable pieces of paper, to be taken away by the viewer, with their dispersal sending them into a multitude of new contexts, adds further dimensions to the relationship between the work ... and the context.”

“Untitled” (1989/1990) debuted in 1990 in Gonzalez-Torres’s first solo show at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York—also the gallery’s inaugural exhibition.

The exhibition’s press release included these words by the artist: “I feel this particular installation is about vulnerability, about having nothing to lose, about the possibility of renewal through the recontextualization of each piece every time it’s taken by the viewer. It is also a comment on the passage of time and on the possibility of erasure and disappearance, it is about the poetics of space, presence, and the beauty of chance. The same chance that makes love possible. It is about life and its most radical definition or demarcation: death. Like all art, it is about leaving this place for some other place maybe better than this place.”

The work was later acquired by Carlos de la Cruz and his late wife, Rosa de la Cruz, who amassed a sizable collection of works by Gonzalez-Torres. “Untitled” was frequently on view in presentations at the de la Cruz Collection, Miami, an exhibition space the couple opened in 2009 to exhibit their collection.

Twinned and paired objects—including mirrors, clocks, photographs, and light bulbs, among others—recur as significant motifs in Gonzalez-Torres’s oeuvre, engaging the universal experiences of love and loss, presence and absence. Together, in their radical openness to interventions of site, audience, and context, Gonzalez-Torres’s works challenge perceived notions of what constitutes an exhibition space, the public, and artworks themselves.

Other unique paper-stack works are part of the permanent collections of museums including Tate, London; SFMOMA; Buffalo AKG Art Museum; Art Institute of Chicago; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Hamburger Kunsthalle; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Rubell Museum, Miami; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.