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Get matched →Sweet Revenge is the first large-scale presentation of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996) in Madrid. The work of the Cuban-born, American artist's emotive and political practice continues to resonate today in powerful ways. This major exhibition uses the paradox of 'sweet revenge' as the methodological lens through which to understand his powerful uses of difference, contradiction, and paradox across different bodies of work.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres was sent to Spain in 1971 as part of a program to transport children out of Cuba. He stayed in Madrid before relocating to Puerto Rico and later New York City. He did not return to Madrid until 1991 on the occasion of a group exhibition, where he premiered the sculpture 'Untitled' (Revenge), a spill of crystal blue candies. Reflecting on his first return to the city, he wrote, 'went back to Madrid after almost twenty years — sweet revenge.'
The exhibition demonstrates how Gonzalez-Torres's work consistently sustains multiple, often seemingly opposing conditions at once. The refined beauty of his aesthetic vocabulary is often tempered or enhanced by the parenthetical parts of titles invoking references to romance, war, illness, and contested social and political narratives. As a queer artist working at the height of the AIDS crisis, his work employs a visual language that is purposefully unstable, participatory, and personal. In his elegiac work, the death of his lover to AIDS in 1991 was fundamental—the artist mourned his loss as much as he celebrated their love.
The exhibition features candy spills, give-away endlessly replenishable paper stacks, curtains, billboards, and light strings—all objects governed by protocols that are structured yet flexible, leaving room for contingency and reinterpretation.
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