Dulce venganza. Felix González-Torres

The Museo Reina Sofía is hosting in the Sabatini Building (1st Floor) from 27 May to 12 October the first major exhibition in Madrid of the work of the Cuban-born American artist Felix González-Torres (1957-1996), whose emotional and political dimension remains fully topical.

González-Torres lived for a short period of time in Madrid in 1971, as a result of a programme designed to move Cuban children out of their country. This life experience formed part of his early works and throughout his short career. In 1991 he returned to our city on the occasion of a group exhibition, in which he presented for the first time “Untitled” (Revenge), a crystal-blue sweet sculpture. Recalling that first return, he wrote: « I have returned to Madrid after almost twenty years: sweet revenge ».

Now, this exhibition at the Reina Sofía uses the idea of « sweet revenge » as a methodological tool to approach his work. Through it, it aims to understand his powerful use of difference, contradiction and paradox in the different sets of works that comprise it. His work leaves room for contingency, transformation and reinterpretation.

The central framework of Sweet Revenge consists of showing how González-Torres's work simultaneously sustains multiple conditions, often seemingly opposed. The tension between these terms is not circumstantial, but constitutive of the work, and is what activates its capacity to generate critical reflection.

As a queer artist who worked during the hardest years of the AIDS crisis, and in a US political context marked by the conservative right, González-Torres developed a deliberately unstable, participatory and deeply personal visual language.