Sweet Revenge

Sweet Revenge is the first large-scale presentation of Felix Gonzalez-Torres in Madrid, bringing together more than fifty works across the Cuban-born American artist’s influential practice. Paper stacks, candy spills, curtains, billboards, light strings and text-based works demonstrate the combination of conceptual precision, emotional intensity and political urgency that continues to make Gonzalez-Torres a defining figure for younger generations.

The title comes from the artist’s own relationship with Madrid. Sent to Spain from Cuba in 1971 as a child before later moving to Puerto Rico and New York, Gonzalez-Torres returned to Madrid around twenty years later and described the experience as a form of “sweet revenge.” The curators use this phrase as a framework for understanding the contradictions that run throughout his work: sweetness and resistance, generosity and disappearance, intimacy and public address.

Many works are governed by instructions rather than by a single fixed physical form. Candy sculptures can be replenished, paper stacks can be taken away by visitors, portraits can be rewritten and billboards can change according to context. This deliberate instability challenges conventional ideas of authorship, permanence and ownership while giving viewers an active role in the life of the work.

The exhibition also situates Gonzalez-Torres within the political conditions of the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, including the AIDS crisis and conservative politics. The death of his partner Ross Laycock in 1991 profoundly shaped a practice in which private loss could be expressed through spare, often beautiful forms without becoming merely autobiographical.

Installed across the Sabatini Building and extending into Madrid through public billboards, Sweet Revenge emphasises how Gonzalez-Torres used abstraction, participation and seduction as strategies of resistance.

Image credit: Installation view, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Sweet Revenge, Museo Reina Sofía, 27 May–12 October 2026. Curated by Alejandro Cesarco and Nancy Spector. Photograph: Roberto Ruiz. © Estate Felix Gonzalez-Torres.