Felix Gonzalez-Torres

An exhibition of work by New York artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres will be on view at Beaver College Art Gallery, 450 S. Easton Road, Feb. 14 through March 14.

Press Release

GLENSIDE, Pa. – An exhibition of work by New York artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres will be on view at Beaver College Art Gallery, 450 S. Easton Road, Reb. 14 through March 14.

Born in Cuba in 1957, Gonzalez-Torres manipulates and combines characteristics of sculpture, photography, printmaking and performance in his work. He is perhaps best known for his installations of immense quantities of individually wrapped candy heaped in the corners of a room or spread out on the floor.

The Beaver College Art Gallery is located in the Spruance Art Center on the campus at Church and Easton Roads. The gallery is open to the public Monday through Friday 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Sunday 1 to 4 p.m. and by appointment. Admission is free.

Noted artist Tim Rollins, who recently published a book-length interview with Gonzalez-Torres, will discuss Gonzalez-Torres’ art at a free lecture Thursday, Feb. 24 at 6:30 p.m. at the Little Theater, also located on the Beaver College campus.

Gonzalez-Torres employs a spare aesthetic that is indebted to post-minimalism and conceptualism and is infused with emotional and socio-political content. Themes of loss and love are predominate in his work, along with critical examinations of power and virility.

Los Angeles Times art critic David Pagel noted, “Gonzalez-Torres’ ‘Minimalism’ scrutinizes neither the facts of perception nor the reality of arts materials, but the social forces that hold us together and tear us apart.”

His well-known candy piles recall the corner works of Robert Smithson and the scatter pieces of Robert Morris. They exhibit abundant formal beauty while embodying the notion of a work of art as an object of consumption and gratification. He often invites viewers to take a piece of candy away with them, to undermine the idea of exclusive ownership and alter the elevated status of the art object.

Three Gonzalez-Torres works will be presented at Beaver College Art Gallery, including Untitled (Public Opinion), which is comprised of 900 pounds of foil-wrapped black licorice rods. This work, part of the permanent collection of the Guggenheim Museum, was created during the Gulf War and alludes to the manner in which public opinion was manipulated by the government and the media during that conflict.

Gonzalez-Torres also will exhibit several of his photostat “Date” works and a collage at Beaver College Art Gallery.

A variety of other kinds of works, including draperies, mirrors, lights and another candy pile will be exhibited at a concurrent show at The Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia Feb. 14 from 5 to 7 p.m. at The Fabric Workshop, 1315 Cherry St. Admission is free.

Gonzalez-Torres has had his work exhibited internationally with solo shows in Paris, Stockholm, Vienna, and Milan. He has been involved in numerous group exhibitions, including the 1991 Whitney Biennial and a current three-person exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre in London. The Philadelphia Museum of Art recently acquired and installed one of his works.

Gonzalez-Torres is the recipient of two artists’ fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Polock Krasner grant and a DAAD Artist-in-Residence grant. His exhibition at Beaver College Art Gallery. Tim Rollins’ lecture on the artist is funded in part by a grant from the Montgomery County Foundation.

Beaver College is a co-educational, independent, comprehensive college in suburban Philadelphia, offering undergraduate and graduate study to more than 2,300 students annually. The Beaver College Center for Education Abroad, one of the largest campus-based study abroad programs in the country, serves an additional 1,200 students each year from nearly 200 American colleges and universities.