Felix Gonzalez-Torres

The beauty might lie in its initial imperceptibility: an empty, cavernous room with worn-wood floors, stamped-tile ceiling, and towering windows which wrap a corner and span a full wall. One might see the color first: somewhere between cyan and azure, almost cerulean. Then, their shape: draping nearly the entire height of the room, two dozen feet at least, ending in gentle folds upon the floor. Loverboy (1989), one of the two works on view in “inbetweenness,” an exhibition of the late Félix González-Torres at the Judd Foundation, operates in the shimmering space between object and surroundings, inside and outside.

Curated by Flavin Judd, the son of Donald Judd, and located on the ground floor of the Judd Foundation, “inbetweenness” is the most recent exhibition in a set of programming which features Judd’s cohort of collaborators and friends. (Exhibitions rotate around two pairs of permanently installed chrome-and-blue Judd boxes, which punctuate the space like a set of sentries.) Central to the younger Judd’s thinking for this show was the manner in which both artists explored ideas of space and duration: in this arrangement, one walks through, along, or with the works. González-Torres’s Untitled (1991-93), a massive black-and-white photograph of a plume of clouds dotted with two birds, spans two walls, centered by a shadowed black crevice. Originally conceived of as a billboard, viewing the work in an indoor setting subverts its original spatial relation, pixelating and disintegrating under our close gaze.

Along with Loverboy, Untitled induces another sense of the dislocation between outdoor and indoor, public and private, inviting a viewer to meditate on the ways ostensibly the same work changes with different installations and at different times. The foundation invites viewers to send in their own photographs of the work, capturing it under different times of day, seasons, and sensibilities: a participatory posthumous sculpture. —Lisa Yin Zhang