The Met to Present Major Survey of Works by Renowned Contemporary Artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the First in New York City in Over Three Decades

Exhibition Details: June 10 – October 18, 2027
Exhibition Location: The Met Fifth Avenue

(New York, September 22, 2026)–The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the first major survey in New York City since 1995 of works by the celebrated contemporary artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (b. 1957, Guáimaro, Cuba; d. 1996, Miami). Unlike a traditional monographic presentation, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Spaces Between, on view June 10–October 18, 2027, will display more than 40 of the artist’s works—in installation, painting, photography, sculpture, and video, from public and private collections—in locations across the Museum, recontextualizing the galleries in 14 of The Met’s collecting areas and reframing Gonzalez-Torres’s work in turn. Works on view will include, “Untitled" (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, an empty blue platform ringed with 48 lightbulbs, briefly activated once per day by a lamé-clad go-go dancer; “Untitled" (Perfect Lovers), 1987–1990, twin battery-powered clocks initially set to the same time that inevitably desynchronize; and “Untitled" (Revenge), 1991, an endless supply of blue candies in clear wrappers. Situating these works within the Museum's permanent collection galleries—including those dedicated to ancient Egyptian art, medieval art, historic British interiors, and American sculpture, among others—will create encounters that reflect the artist's interest in circulation and dispersal, interaction and political engagement, and the thresholds between public and private life. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago, which will present a simultaneous, distinct exhibition, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: This Work Cannot Be Destroyed.

The exhibition is supported in part by the Aretê Foundation/Betsy and Ed Cohen, Nancy Magoon, Kim and Jon Shirley, the Vanguard Council, and Marguerite Hoffman.

"Felix Gonzalez-Torres is one of the most important artists of the 20th century. His installations transform ephemeral materials into enduring experiences that grapple with ideas such as time, loss, and love. His work is beloved for its rigor as well as its spare poetry," said Max Hollein, The Met's Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. "For the first presentation of the artist in New York City in over three decades, The Met will showcase his art throughout the Museum, in conversation with 5,000 years of human creativity. As we look ahead to the Tang Wing, our new space for modern and contemporary art, opening in 2030, this exhibition of Felix Gonzalez-Torres's work signals how The Met can cross time periods and geographies to elicit new resonances between contemporary and historical art."

"Felix Gonzalez-Torres made a history-changing body of work that never chose between the personal and the political, the piercingly direct and the generously enigmatic,” said David Breslin, The Met's Leonard A. Lauder Curator in Charge, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. “The AIDS crisis was the crucible that forged his resolute conceptual clarity, and his brilliance was creating an open-ended body of work where new meanings can be embedded into historical ones. This exhibition is an opportunity to bring new critical attention to an artist whose full complexity is still being understood. Presenting it at The Met, spanning the Museum and departments, Gonzalez-Torres’s work gives us the opportunity to witness what binds humanity across time and what fixes each of us in our present."

“Thirty years since Gonzalez-Torres’s untimely passing from the complications of AIDS, his work continues to be simultaneously deceptively beautiful and rigorously acute, defiantly romantic and precisely analytical—and uncannily present,” said Ann Goldstein, Interim Maurice Marciano Director, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, who co-organized the artist's first major survey exhibition, Traveling, together with Amada Cruz and Susanne Ghez, in 1994. “Knowing that his life would likely be short, Gonzalez-Torres deliberately structured his work to ensure its continued existence: to be manifest anew and by those who would not know him, and with parenthetical titles that never fix its meaning—making it permeable to each new encounter.”

Born in Guáimaro, Cuba, in 1957, Gonzalez-Torres spent part of his early life abroad, briefly in Spain and then Puerto Rico, before settling in New York City in 1979, where he attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1981 and 1983 and later earned his BFA from the Pratt Institute. From 1987 to 1994, he was a member of Group Material, the influential New York–based artists' collective known for its politically engaged exhibitions and public projects. Alongside founding members Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, and Tim Rollins, Gonzalez-Torres contributed to the collective's expansive research and installation-based approach to art making, tracing cultural and political reverberations across the United States. That commitment to collective memory and documentation would inform his own practice as he came to prominence in the early 1990s. His artworks transformed keen attention to contemporary social and political subjects, personal and collective grief, a voracious interest in history, and queer identity into an enduring form of artistic testimony and inquiry. As it did for many artists of his generation, the AIDS crisis profoundly shaped both the creation and reception of Gonzalez-Torres’s work. Gonzalez-Torres created an open-ended body of work intended to endure and adapt beyond his lifetime, influencing generations to come. He would die from AIDS-related complications in 1996.

Gonzalez-Torres worked across a range of mediums and strategies, often with simple materials, achieving powerful emotional and sensorial effects from minimal means. He transformed everyday objects into meditations on time, history, value, equality, loss, and love. Many of his works invite viewers to participate directly. In works like “Untitled” (Blood), 1992, viewers can pass through a curtain of red and clear bead strands that must be tailored to fit existing thresholds. In candy works such as "Untitled” (Placebo – Landscape – for Roni), 1993, visitors are free to take pieces from a vast spill of gold candies, while works like "Untitled," 1990, allow viewers to take sheets of printed paper from a towering stack. In doing so, they continually deplete the work: each visitor’s individual act of taking, combined with that of countless others, reshapes the work’s form, potentially producing its absence. The owner or host institution can choose to replenish the work, beginning the cycle again. To Gonzalez-Torres, the openness of this interaction was essential, positioning both the public and the exhibitor as collaborators who complete the work, ensuring that his creations would continually adapt to new contexts rather than be fixed in time. Such openness was also a challenge to art museums, which are often more comfortable preserving singular objects than facilitating the distribution of an endless supply of material.

Rather than provide definitive answers, his art poses a handful of lasting questions: where the self ends and the social begins; what it means to own a work of art that can be depleted or given away and yet always returns; how notions of originality, value, ownership, and authorship are perceived; and how an object as ordinary as a string of lights, a beaded curtain, a pair of clocks, or a pile of candy can be weighted with memory. Each work remains open to interpretation yet holds within it a spirit of quiet, generous critique—of institutions, of authorship, and of the social and political categories and histories that structure our lives. Gonzalez-Torres described the purpose of his work simply: "Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that's why I made works of art."

The Spaces Between exemplifies The Met's forward-looking, cross-disciplinary approach to presenting modern and contemporary art in dialogue with the Museum's expansive collection. The exhibition's presentation across many departments anticipates the curatorial vision of the Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art, which will situate modernism and its legacies within a continuous, global history, most recently experienced in the installation Giacometti in the Temple of Dendur. Museum departments participating in The Spaces Between are the American Wing, Ancient American Art in The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, Ancient West Asian Art, Arms and Armor, Asian Art, Egyptian Art, Education, European Paintings, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, Greek and Roman Art, Medieval Art and The Cloisters, Modern and Contemporary Art, the Robert Lehman Collection, and the Thomas J. Watson Library. Seen throughout the Museum’s Fifth Avenue building, Gonzalez-Torres's work illuminates the connections between eras and collections that lie at the heart of The Met's mission.

The exhibition’s title is drawn from a one-line fax Gonzalez-Torres sent to his friend and gallerist Andrea Rosen in May 1994—“I watched closely the spaces between the birds. E. Bishop”—quoting an early essay by the poet Elizabeth Bishop, in which she likens the spaces between the birds to “the rest in music . . . not a blankness but a space as musical as all the sound.” Distributed across The Met with no prescribed sequence, the exhibition’s installations stitch together diverse spaces across the Museum, inviting visitors to chart their own journeys between them.

About Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Gonzalez-Torres’s work has been the subject at major international exhibitions at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2026); Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. (2024–25); Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2016); Metropolitan Arts Centre, Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom (2016); PLATEAU and Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea (2012); Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels; MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; and Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2010–11); Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany (2007); The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela; and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1995–96); and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., and The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (1994). The artist was featured in the United States pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. His work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many other public institutions.

Exhibition Catalogue
The exhibition’s accompanying catalogue, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Spaces Between, will expand the project’s central themes through newly commissioned texts from David Breslin, The Met's Leonard A. Lauder Curator in Charge, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art; Ann Goldstein, Interim Maurice Marciano Director, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Paulina Pobocha, chair and curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago; and Samuel Shapiro, Research Associate, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Met.

The catalogue is made possible by the Diane W. and James E. Burke Fund.

Additional support is provided by the Mary and Louis S. Myers Foundation Endowment Fund and the Christian Keesee Charitable Trust.

Exhibition Credits
The Spaces Between is organized by David Breslin, The Met’s Leonard A. Lauder Curator in Charge, Modern and Contemporary Art, and Ann Goldstein, Interim Maurice Marciano Director, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, with Samuel Shapiro, Research Associate, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Met. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago, where Paulina Pobocha, Chair and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, curated This Work Cannot Be Destroyed.

The Met will host a variety of exhibition-related programs, to be announced at a later date.

About The Met’s Modern and Contemporary Art Collection
The Met holds one of the world’s leading collections of 20th- and 21st- century art, spanning painting, sculpture, design, installation, and time-based media. Anchored by key holdings including the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection and the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, the department has exceptional holdings in Abstract Expressionism, American Modernism with a renewed focus on the Harlem Renaissance, and global contemporary art from 2000 to the present. The department’s collection includes iconic paintings by Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe, Aaron Douglas, Jackson Pollock, Georg Baselitz, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Carmen Herrera, Nicole Eisenman, and Kerry James Marshall; sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, Isamu Noguchi, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Charles Ray, and Wangechi Mutu; works on paper by Paul Klee, Zarina, and Julio Le Parc; design and decorative art objects from Art Nouveau to the Memphis Group; installations and videos by Arthur Jafa, William Kentridge, Nalini Malani, and Pipilotti Rist, and much more. The Tang Wing presents a unique opportunity to newly contextualize modern and contemporary art historical movements at an institution that holds centuries of art and believes in the power of cross-cultural exchange.

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September 22, 2026

Image: “Untitled” (Placebo – Landscape – for Roni) (detail), 1993 © Estate Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Courtesy Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation