Exceptional Works: Felix Gonzalez-Torres

"Untitled" (Perfect Lovers), 1987-1990

Wall clocks
 Two parts; ideally installed above head height
 Original clocks: 13 1/2 inches diameter each

“Don’t be afraid of the clocks, they are our time, time has been so generous to us. We imprinted time with the sweet taste of victory. We conquered fate by meeting it at a certain TIME in a certain space. We are a product of the time, therefore we give back credit where it is due: time. We are synchronized, now and forever.”

—Letter from Felix Gonzalez-Torres to Ross Laycock, 1988

Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996) is one of the most significant artists to have emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In its reduced formal vocabulary, conceptual rigor, and evocative use of everyday materials, the artist’s work resonates with meaning that is at once specific and mutable, rigorous and generous, poetic and political. Gonzalez-Torres passed away from complications from AIDS.

Presented on the occasion of Art Basel 2025 is one of the artist’s most iconic works: “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), 1987–1990. Other editions are in the collections of Glenstone, Potomac and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and a related unique work is in that of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers), 1987–1990

Installation view, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (Sagitario), 1994-1995 installed in Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

Twinned and paired objects—including mirrors, clocks, photographs, and lightbulbs, among others—recur as one of the significant motifs in Gonzalez-Torres’s oeuvre, evocative of the interconnection between sameness and difference, as well as relationality, equality, queer intimacy, loss, mortality and immortality. In their radical openness to interventions of site, audience, and context, Gonzalez-Torres’s works challenge perceived notions of what constitutes an exhibition space, a public, an artwork itself.

As curator and writer Robert Storr notes, “Most poignant of all these emblems of intimacy and incomplete mutuality are … twin electric clocks that touch … [but] also remain separate and self-contained.... Initially set to the identical hour, minute, and second, these low-tech, battery-powered time pieces gradually fall out of synch as they wind down, with one inevitably stopping before the other [The artist specified that the clocks be ideally installed above head height, and if one or both clocks stop completely, the clocks should be restarted and resynchronized]. The sting of this existential metaphor lies in the ordinariness of the devices that embody it and in the understated but inescapable implications of the growing discrepancy between the two animated surrogates the artist all too knowingly called ‘perfect lovers’.... Any and all possibilities are conceivable, and therein lies the work’s profound provocativeness.”

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled,” 1992–1995. Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland

Installation view, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Politics of Relation, MACBA (Museum of Contemporary Art), Barcelona, 2021

“Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), 1987–1990 installed in Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Sprengel Museum, Hannover, 1997

“The two readymade, battery-operated wall clocks of “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) (1987–1990) had become more than five minutes out of sync. When I first noticed the difference, quite without thinking, I caught myself turning to my own watch to get the correct, actual time and verify which of the two clocks was ‘right.’ In that very moment, I understood how well Gonzalez-Torres’s twin clocks (which invariably differ in their time telling as an exhibition progresses, sometimes by mere seconds, sometimes by whole minutes) reveal a fundamental premise of the artist’s practice. It was something that all the readings I knew of that particular work, which speaks of couples and love and mortality, had somehow missed: two clocks, hopelessly telling two different times, cannot help but create the doubt that Gonzalez-Torres had so adamantly wished to instill in others—the questioning of the idea of any one absolute authority.”

—Elena Filipovic, curator

Installation view, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Traveling, The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1994

Installation view, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, 2011. Photo by Axel Schneider. Image courtesy of MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst

“My heart still aches whenever I see the two synchronized clocks of “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers)…. For me there is no other artist who affects so much with so little, and it remains stunning that profound emotional intensity can be evoked by such spare forms.”

—Joe Scanlan, artist and critic

Installation view, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form, Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Belgium, 2010

“Gonzalez-Torres insists in his work that beauty is not best expressed or contained in the enduring art object; rather in the moment of experience, of human interaction, the passion of remembrance.... The art object is merely a mirror, giving a glimpse that is also a shadow of what was once real, present, concrete.”

—bell hooks, writer

Installation view, The Shape of Time, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 2018

Installation view, Artist's Choice: Mona Hatoum, Here Is Elsewhere, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2003, featuring the related but unique work, "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers), 1991

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers), 1987-1990

 

“Break the pleasure of representation, the pleasure of the flawless narrative.... This is not life, this is just an artwork. I want you, the viewer, to be intellectually challenged, moved, and informed.”

—Felix Gonzalez-Torres

David Zwirner at Art Basel