‘I can’t separate my art from my life’ Felix Gonzalez-Torres, emblematic artist in the fight against AIDS
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, one of the most committed artists in the fight against AIDS during the eighties and nineties, couldn’t conceive of the practice of art being separate from life and social activism. ‘It is all my personal history, all that stuff… gender and sexual preference, it’s all that. I can’t separate my art from my life’, said the artist in an interview from 1990. His well-known installations, made with long strings of bulbs suspended in space and in a series of light patterns, evoke the idea of luminous garlands associated with parties in the popular imaginary. At the same time, they are a powerful, yet melancholic reminder of the inevitability of the passage of time.
