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Previous Exhibition

25/05/2020 - 05/07/2020

“Untitled” (Fortune Cookie Corner)

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

 

Quetzal participates in a special exhibition of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres “Untitled” (Fortune Cookie Corner) presented by Andrea Rosen Gallery and David Zwirner Gallery.

In an era of social distancing, can a fortune cookie help to bring us together? That question, and several others, are at the core of this exhibition.

 

Felix Gonzalez-Torres
“Untitled” (Fortune Cookie Corner), 1990
Fortune cookies, endless supply
Overall dimensions vary with installation
Original Installation: approximately 10.000 fortune cookies

Curated by Andrea Rosen

For the exhibition an international group of a thousand people, including artists, collectors, colleagues, and friends of Gonzalez-Torres and Rosen, were invited to show the work according to a given set of parameters specifically for this exhibition, thus to create new meaning and understanding to Gonzalez-Torres work.

“In choosing to participate” the invite reads, “one becomes a facilitator, a part of the total ‘site’, a viewer, an audience. Inge and Cees de Bruin-Heijn are honored to be asked to participate to install “Untitled” (Fortune Cookie Corner), a piece consisting of an endless pile of fortune cookies, that can be taken away and consumed by viewers. They decided to show it at their estate Quinta do Quetzal.

The fortune cookie corner is the first work in the artist’s ‘candy’ series (all the others were wrapped candies) that celebrates generosity and love. The participant can find its own fortune cookies as long as the concealed fortune has a positive message. Quetzal chef João Mourato and his team produced the fortune cookies themselves.

That you can source the cookies yourself and the possibility that the work can be installed in more than one place at a time makes it perfect for the global situation of Covid19, where we are all limited in our freedom. A lot is happening online, but with this exhibition a physical experience with the artwork is possible and being part of a bigger dialogue. All participants are asked to document the manifestation of the work in photo and video; from the installation process, to the regeneration to its original size halfway through the installation, as to the interactions with the work.

Andrea Rosen explains on Artnet how important this moment is globally, “it makes people acknowledge that significant crisis, whether that be a war, a genocide, or the AIDS epidemic, have often been depersonalized for those people who are not affected. This is an opportunity to realize what it feels like to be one site, one globe, one world, everything that’s happening affects us all.”

All of Gonzalez-Torres’s work shares this enduring hope in the face of loss and impermanence. There is a deep sense of connectedness to others and to the world, as well as an acknowledgment of the faith, trust, and vulnerability that accompany opening ourselves up to something or someone else.

The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation launched its new website, in conjunction with the exhibition.

 

Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Felix Gonzalez-Torres (November 26, 1957 – January 9, 1996) was a Cuban-born American visual artist. Gonzalez-Torres was known for his quiet, minimal installations and sculptures. Using materials such as strings of lightbulbs, clocks, stacks of paper, or packaged hard candies, his work is sometimes considered a reflection of his experience with AIDS. As an openly gay man, he felt it was “much more powerful to assume that the gay and straight audience was the same audience, that being a Cuban-born American is the same as being an American. In 1987, he joined Group Material, a New York-based group of artists whose intention was to work collaboratively, adhering to principles of cultural activism and community education. González-Torres was considered within his time to be a process artist due to the nature of his ‘removable’ installations by which the process is a key feature to the installation. Many of his installations invite the viewer to take a piece of the work with them.