Felix Gonzalez-Torres / Roni Horn

Your life is a rare form of transparency through which I have observed the world becoming more present to itself and through which I have become more present to myself. Roni Horn, An Uncountable Infinity (for Felix Gonzalez-Torres), 1996

In 1990 Felix Gonzalez-Torres encountered an artwork by Roni Horn called Gold Field (1980/82), a simple sheet of gold foil placed on the floor of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Gonzalez-Torres was deeply moved and wrote to Horn, beginning an exchange between the artists that would last until Gonzalez-Torres' passing in 1996. Felix Gonzalez-Torres Roni Horn was created as a photographic essay with the intention of sharing the experiential qualities of the artists' work and the profound relationships underlying it. It explores four iconic works (among others)-"Untitled" (For Stockholm) (1992) and "Untitled" (Blood) (1992) by Gonzalez-Torres, and Well and Truly (2009-10) and a.k.a. (2008-09) by Horn-and emphasizes notions of doubling, duality, repetition, and identity. Images of these pieces, taken on the occasion of a 2022 exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce-Pinault Collection in Paris, reveal both artists' radical visual vocabularies, as well their shared passion for language, writing and poetry. Their intention emerges as two-fold: to create a tension between artist, viewer and object; and to grasp the inexpressible, the immeasurable.