MAY 28, 2020 

Photo by Sven Laurent; courtesy of Wiels Contemporary Art Centre 

Andrea Rosen Gallery and David Zwirner are pleased to present a live exhibition of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Fortune Cookie Corner) in various places throughout the world. 

This exhibition invites a diverse and international group of 1,000 people to each manifest the work as a “place” as part of one total “site” of this expansive exhibition. Invitees who choose to participate will be given a set of parameters specifically for this exhibition, thus establishing a fresh set of artistic interventions.

Participants will initiate the installation in their “place” with between 240 to 1,000 fortune cookies. In addition to this decision, each “place” will decide the location and configuration of the pile, beginning on May 25, 2020.

Individuals must be permitted to take pieces from the work, and the participants will regenerate their piles (back to the amount with which they started) halfway through the presentation, on June 14. The presentation will end on July 5, at which point any remaining fortune cookies will no longer be “the work.”

Photograph: David Zwirner website 

The exhibition recognizes this unique moment in history and reflects the ever-relevant and flexible nature of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Like many of Gonzalez-Torres’s works, including his candy works and paper stacks, “Untitled” (Fortune Cookie Corner) addresses the capacity for immortality through regeneration, heightened by the experience of loss within these works. As Gonzalez-Torres was interested in his work providing an opportunity for questioning, some questions that may be broached by this work and this exhibition were provided to participants.

Much of Gonzalez-Torres’s work asks owners, curators, participants, and viewers alike to engage with his oeuvre beyond the confines of an institution or gallery space. In this exhibition, participant is asked to document the manifestation of the work throughout the course of the six-week exhibition, which may include the installation process, the work’s context, interaction with the work, and how the work ebbs and flows. This exhibition also addresses notions of audience and accessibility, and questions the arbitrary separations we create between the broader notions of public and private space. Documentation of this physical exhibition, “Untitled” (Fortune Cookie Corner), will be viewable on both Andrea Rosen Gallery’s website and David Zwirner’s website beginning May 25, 2020.