The 52nd International Art Exhibition opens on June 10
The 52nd Intl. Art Exhibition Think with the senses - Feel with the mind, directed by Robert Storr, opens to the public on June 10 in the Giardini and Arsenale venues, and in other venues in Venice.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres: "America" 52nd International Venice Biennale
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (America), 1994. 15 watt lightbulbs, waterproof extension cords, waterproof rubber light sockets, overall dimensions vary with installation, 12 parts: 20 m in length, with 7.5 m of extra cord each. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Purchase with Funds from the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee. Installation view of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Girlfriend in a Coma) at Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, 1996. Photo: Marc Domage / Tutti. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
A Cuban-born, American citizen, Gonzalez-Torres is best known for his immensely generous yet rigorously conceptual art in the form of endlessly replenishable paper stacks, take-away candy spills, light strings, beaded curtains, and public billboards. With its minimalist refinement and quiet referentiality, his work treads a fine line between social commentary and personal disclosure, equivocating between the two realms and obscuring the culturally-determined distinctions that separate them. Shifting from cultural activism to intimate, autobiographical dimensions—and subsequently eroding the boundaries between—Gonzalez-Torres used the aesthetic allure of his art to stage a subtle critique of social injustice and intolerance. By creating open-ended, participatory artworks, he entrusted his viewers to engage with and ultimately activate their meaning.
Only the second artist to posthumously represent the United States in the modern history of the Venice Biennale (Robert Smithson was chosen in 1982), Gonzalez-Torres had been previously nominated for the 45th Venice Biennale in 1995, and this exhibition expands upon and rearticulates his original proposal for the U.S. Pavilion. Nancy Spector, Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, who organized Gonzalez-Torres’s retrospective there in 1995, is the U.S. Commissioner for the 52nd Biennale.
Because Gonzalez-Torres conceived of his art as existing both within the museum and dispersed throughout the community the exhibition also includes a series of twelve outdoor billboards of the same image of a bird in flight, installed throughout the city of Venice. Presented without identifying text, these billboard images exist as lyrical spaces for contemplation amid the bustle of urban life.
