Realizing a late artist’s vision

A large-scale environmental artwork conceived but never realized by the late Cuban American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres will be constructed for a retrospective of the artist’s work to be exhibited at the 2007 Venice Biennale in Italy.

Nancy Spector, curator of contemporary art and director of curatorial affairs at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, will organize the exhibition and oversee the fabrication of the outdoor installation, which she describes as two adjoining reflecting pools, each 12 feet in diameter, that approximate a figure eight or the sign of infinity.

Spector, who organized a major survey of the artist’s work at the Guggenheim in 1995, said that the Guggenheim will identify the stone masons and other craftspeople needed to realize the work based on 1992 drawings and notes submitted by the artist for the piece, originally intended for the campus of Western Washington University, but that another artist will not be involved.

“As someone who is familiar with his sensibility, I like to think I would able to approximate what he wanted to do,” Spector said Thursday of the artist, who died in 1996 of complications from AIDS.

Gonzalez is not the first deceased artist selected to represent the U.S. at the Biennale, which presented a show of the works of sculptor Robert Smithson in 1982, nine years after his death in 1973.

Diane Haithman