“Untitled” (Golden)

Like many Minimalist and Post-Minimalist works, this installation by Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres invites us to interact with it. A curtain of gold beads shimmers across the centre of this gallery, forming a tactile threshold you must walk through to fully experience the work. The beads form a porous boundary between what you have just seen and what you have yet to experience. “Untitled” (Golden) is both active and malleable: it not only transforms the architecture of the gallery but constantly shifts in shape every time a viewer walks through it.

Gonzalez-Torres created several bead curtain works. He employed seriality in these installations, so they are conceptually and functionally similar, although the colours of the beads differ from work to work.

This is one of the last bead curtain works the artist made before his premature death from AIDS complications in 1996. While these works appear playful and celebratory, referencing nightclubs or Cuban festivities, they also address the issue of AIDS. Some of their titles invoke bodily fluids or substances associated with the virus, such as “Untitled” (Blood) or “Untitled” (Chemo). In light of this context, “Untitled” (Golden) can also be seen as a permeable membrane between life and death.