Sweet Revenge Marks the First Solo Exhibition of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Work in Madrid

• The Museo Reina Sofía hosts the first large-scale presentation of the work of the Cuban-born, American artist in the Spanish capital. 

• The exhibition, featuring more than fifty works by Gonzalez-Torres in various formats—including his give-away, endlessly replenishable sculptures—will be on view on Floor 1 of the Sabatini Building and will extend into the city with billboards installed in several metro stations

• The Fundación Museo Reina Sofía, in its mission to support the Museum, collaborates in this exhibition through the acquisition of a work.

The Director of the Museo Reina Sofía, Manuel Segade, presented today the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Sweet Revenge alongside its curators, Alejandro Cesarco and Nancy Spector. For Manuel Segade, the figure of Felix Gonzalez-Torres “is as paradoxical as the exhibition's very title, because his work possesses an apparent lightness, a melancholic softness, but also includes an enormous political and active force'.

Regarding this exhibition, curator Alejandro Cesarco points out that “we approach the oxymoron ‘sweet revenge’” not only as a title, but as a conceptual framework, a tool to understand the artist’s sustained use of subtlety, multiplicity, and paradox as artistic strategies. Here sweetness and revenge are not opposites, they coexist. Seduction becomes political, beauty becomes a form of verification, and abstraction a strategy of resistance'."

The exhibition's co-curator, Nancy Spector, has highlighted that “I've always been struck by the presence and cultural relevancy of his vision. While made in response to a specific time and place, namely New York or broadly the United States in the late 1980s and early 90s during Ronald Breaken's presidency and the AIDS epidemic the work is infinitely applicable to the time we are in".

From May 27 to October 12, 2026, Floor 1 of the Sabatini Building hosts an exhibition dedicated to the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Guáimaro, Cuba, 1957 – Miami, United States, 1996), one of the most influential figures in contemporary art of recent decades. His work—characterized by its impermanence, participatory nature, conceptual rigor, and profound political and emotional dimensions continues to deeply influence contemporary generations of artists.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Sweet Revenge includes more than fifty works by the artist, presented in a display space that has been architecturally adapted for the occasion. It features loans from institutions such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland, among others, as well as from private collections. Furthermore, this exhibition has been made possible thanks to the support of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.

The city of Madrid was an emotionally complex place for Gonzalez-Torres. In 1971, he was sent to Spain as part of a program aimed at relocating children from Cuba to escape the regime. He remained here for a short period before moving to Puerto Rico and later to New York, where he would spend most of his adult life. He did not return to the city until 1991, on the occasion of a group exhibition. Recalling that first return, he wrote: “back to Madrid after almost twenty years: sweet revenge.” Under this notion of “sweet revenge,” the exhibition proposes, in the words of its curators, “an understanding of the powerful use of difference, contradiction, and paradox across the various bodies of work it brings together”.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s works operate within a set of principles, instructions, and possibilities. For instance, certain works, composed of commercially produced materials, are fabricated anew for each presentation. Similarly, text portraits are alterable; the individual or institution that owns the portrait, as well as those responsible for exhibiting it, may modify its content. In this way, the artist challenges notions of authorship and permanence, embracing flexibility and open interpretation.

Gonzalez-Torres’s work is inseparable from the context in which he developed his practice, marked by the AIDS crisis and conservative politics in the United States during the 1980s and ‘90s. As a queer artist, he developed a deliberately unstable and deeply personal visual language, profoundly shaped by the death of his partner from AIDS in 1991. Aware of the imminence of his own death from the same illness, Gonzalez-Torres anticipated the future of his work and left behind an influential legacy in which aesthetic forms become vehicles for emotional resonance and political urgency.

More information in the full press release. 

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