Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return

Félix González-Torres: Always to Return examines the artist’s oeuvre in relation to portraiture. Accompanying a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery and Archives of American Art, this project is an experiment in what happens when the artist’s work and the Smithsonian’s collections meet. The specific, yet open-ended nature of González-Torres’s work—his life as a queer, Cuban-born immigrant who lived in Madrid, Puerto Rico, New York, and Miami—encourage new ways of thinking about portraiture, historiography, and the construction of identity. His practice probes the very existence of binaries such as past and present, public and private, major and minor, collective and individual. This model of interconnection inspired curatorial decisions to pair portraits from the museum’s collection with artwork by González-Torres. Building upon these themes, Always to Return offers new ways to observe the artist’s work, contextualizing his renowned practice within broader art histories.