SFMOMA is commemorating its 75th year as a pioneering force in art, locally and globally. To celebrate their anniversary, they are presenting a series of exhibitions and events that illustrate the stories of the artists, collectors, cultural visionaries, and community leaders who founded, built, and have animated the museum. A suite of exhibitions highlights the unique strengths of SFMOMA’s collection and moments when the museum broke new ground, expanding the conventional wisdom of what an art museum should present and collect.

Featured contemporary artists include:

Nicholas Nixon’s
Brown Sisters
series of thirty-one portraits of his wife and her sisters that he’s made since 1975

Jeff Koons
Michael Jackson and Bubbles
1988; porcelain

Felix Gonzalez-Torres
“Untitled” (Golden)
1995/2008

Richard Prince
Untitled (Cowboy)
1991-92

Sol LeWitt
Steel Structure
1975/1976; sculpture; aluminum and enamel

Bruce Nauman
Wall/Floor Positions
1968. Video (black and white, sound), 60 min

WIELS premieres a major traveling retrospective of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ oeuvre, including both rarely seen and more known artworks, while proposing an experimental form for the exhibition that is indebted to the artist’s own radical conception of the artwork.

Gonzalez-Torres (American, b. Cuba 1957-1996), one of the most influential artists of his generation, settled in New York in the early 1980s, where he studied art and began his practice as an artist before his untimely death of AIDS related complications. His work can be seen in critical relationship to Conceptual art and Minimalism, mixing political activism, emotional affect, and deep formal concerns in a wide range of media, including drawings, sculpture, and public billboards*, often using ordinary objects as a starting point—clocks, mirrors, light fixtures.

“Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) | 1991 | Clocks and paint on wall

Amongst his most famous artworks are his piles of candy and paper stacks from which viewers are allowed to take away a piece. They are premised, like so much of what he did, on instability and potential for change: artworks without an already preset or specific form. The result is a profoundly human body of work, intimate and vulnerable even as it destabilizes so many seemingly unshakable certainties (the artwork as fixed, the exhibition as a place to look but not touch, the author as the ultimate form-giver).

“Untitled” | 1991