Image: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid will open 'Dulce venganza', described by the museum as the first large-scale presentation in the city of work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996), the American artist of Cuban origin. The exhibition runs from 27 May to 12 October 2026 at the Edificio Sabatini, Planta 1.
According to the museum, the project approaches Gonzalez-Torres’s practice through the idea of ‘sweet revenge’, a phrase the artist himself used after returning to Madrid in 1991. The exhibition uses that concept as a methodological tool to examine the differences, contradictions and paradoxes that run through his work. Museo Reina Sofía says the artist’s emotional and political concerns remain deeply relevant today.
The Madrid connection forms a central thread in the exhibition narrative. Gonzalez-Torres was sent to Spain in 1971 as part of a programme intended to move children out of Cuba. He stayed briefly before moving on to Puerto Rico and later New York, where he spent much of his adult life. He did not return to Madrid until 1991, when he took part in a group exhibition.
That 1991 visit is linked in the museum’s account to 'Untitled' (Revenge), a sculpture of blue candies that Gonzalez-Torres presented for the first time on that occasion. The museum says the exhibition draws on works such as this to show how his art combines refinement with instability, and how titles can carry references to romance, war, illness and broader social and political narratives that may not be immediately visible in the works themselves.
The exhibition also foregrounds the procedures that govern some of Gonzalez-Torres’s best-known forms, including stacks of paper, piles of candy that can be replenished as visitors take them, and installations of curtains, billboards and strings of lights. Examples of these forms are included in the show, which the museum presents as a way to understand how his work sustains multiple conditions at once, often apparently opposed.
Museo Reina Sofía also situates Gonzalez-Torres within the history of queer art and the AIDS crisis. It notes that he worked during the hardest years of the epidemic and within a U.S. political context marked by the conservative right. The museum describes his language as deliberately unstable, participatory and deeply personal, shaped in part by the death of his partner from AIDS in 1991 and by his own awareness of his illness.
'Dulce venganza' is organised by Museo Reina Sofía and curated by Alejandro Cesarco and Nancy Spector. The museum’s exhibition page lists related public activities, including a guided visit titled 'Querido Felix:' and an inaugural talk with Spector, Cesarco and Manuel Segade.
