Félix González-Torres

Félix González-Torres (Guáimaro, 1957 - Miami, 1996) was a Cuban-born American visual artist and one of the most recognized figures of conceptual art in the 1980s and 1990s. His minimalist installations and sculptures are built from everyday materials such as strings of light bulbs, pairs of wall clocks, stacks of paper, and individually wrapped candies. He worked mainly in New York, and his work is still discussed today through themes such as love, loss, identity, and the social consequences of AIDS, an illness he suffered from and which caused his death.

In 1971 he and his sister Gloria were sent to Madrid, where they stayed in an orphanage, and that same year they settled in Puerto Rico with relatives. There he studied art at the University of Puerto Rico and took part in the local art scene. In 1979 he moved to New York on a scholarship. The following year he took part in the Whitney Independent Study Program, where he was introduced to critical theory, and in 1983 he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography from the Pratt Institute. In 1987 he earned a master's degree in fine arts and later taught at New York University. That same year he joined Group Material, a New York collective that worked collaboratively and drew on cultural activism and community education. In 1992 he received a DAAD grant to work in Berlin.

His works rest on the idea that nothing is permanent. Many are installations that can be shown differently in each exhibition, such as the billboards placed in public spaces or the candies that visitors may take, which may or may not be replenished. Influenced by Bertolt Brecht's theory of Epic Theatre, he saw his work as something that needs an audience to be completed and to provoke an individual response. Works such as Untitled (Perfect Lovers) rely on the doubling of identical elements, a recurring device in his practice.

His legacy lies in how he linked conceptual art with the memory of AIDS and with questions about the value and ownership of the artwork. In 2010, the 1992 piece Untitled (Portrait of Marcel Brient) sold at Phillips de Pury & Company for 4.6 million dollars, a record at auction for the artist.