"Untitled" (Placebo)

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

1991

A floor installation of individually wrapped silver-cellophane candies that visitors are invited to take, in which González-Torres transforms a simple sweet into a gesture of shared intimacy and loss.

What hits you is the low, gleaming mound of crinkled silver—endless, reflective and tactile—where one candy pushed forward reads like an intimate invitation amid abundance.

By allowing viewers to remove and consume the work, it turned sculpture into a participatory ritual and a poignant metaphor for love, mortality, and the AIDS crisis, helping to reshape contemporary ideas about relational and social practice in art.

Palette

Exhibitions

Claes Oldenburg

1969

A Museum Menagerie

1975

Prints by Sculptors

1975

Painting and Sculpture from the Museum Collection

1969