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"Untitled" (Last Light), 1993

Installation, Overall dimensions vary with installation

In the 1990s, Felix Gonzalez-Torres composed a series of works using strings of lightbulbs and beaded curtains that combined great formal simplicity with powerful emotive and poetic expression. The subtitles contain autobiographic elements: Love Meal, Summer, Toronto, Rue St. Denis, March 5th, and in the case of the work in the MACBA Collection, Last Night. They point at memorable situations such as a birth date, a specific place or a shared meal: evocations of pleasure at a time when the artist was fully aware of life’s finitude. Fully engaged in various social and political causes, the fight against HIV/AIDS, contracted first by his partner and later by himself, marked the work of this Cuban artist, who made his installations metaphors of the fragility and beauty of life.

Gonzalez-Torres used simple, everyday materials such as paper, sweets, jigsaw puzzles and strings of lights. Employing an aesthetic language influenced by Minimalism and Conceptual art, he imbued the formal qualities of his materials with intense emotion and striking autobiographical and metaphorical narrative. Poetry and melancholy are always present in works that, like his installations of lightbulbs, often evoke the passing of time. The themes of his light installations are loss and regeneration, love, and the inevitably fleeting nature of life.


Technical details

Original title:
"Untitled" (Last Light)
Registration number:
2705
Artist:
Gonzalez-Torres, Felix
Date created:
1993
Date acquired:
2005
Fonds:
MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation
Object type:
Installation
Media:
Light bulbs, bulb sockets, electric wire and transformer
Dimensions:
Overall dimensions vary with installation
Credits:
MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation. Long-term loan of Brondesbury Holdings Ltd.
Copyright:
© The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation
It has accessibility resources:
Yes

Accessibility resources
High-relief image
Tactile reproductions
Texts in braille

The MACBA Collection features Catalan, Spanish and international art and, although it includes works from the 1920s onwards, its primary focus is on the period between the 1960s and the present.

For more information on the work or the artist, please consult MACBA's Library. To request a loan of the work, please write to colleccio [at] macba.cat.

If you need a high resolution image of the work, you must submit an image loan request.