Twenty-three years since his last breath on earth, Felix Gonzalez-Torres is one of the most influential artists and art theorists today.

He synthesized a vast and unique number of influences, political, philosophical and aesthetic, including Marx and Engels, the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht, and the artists Carl Andre, Robert Ryman, and Jeff Koons.

Félix González Torres was born in 1957 in Guáimaro, Cuba. His parents sent him to an orphanage in Madrid where he stayed with his sister until going to live with an aunt and uncle in Puerto Rico in 1971. He was in Puerto Rico until 1979, when he moved to New York. The initial purpose of his migration to the U.S. was to study interior design at Pratt Institute, and, indeed, the majority of his installations are meditations on aspects of interior design, like Warhol's Silver Clouds. However, he would tell his interviewer that, "Pratt Institute is the most banal, empty-minded, crass place you could think of...Spend your money on a car but don’t waste it on Pratt."

Hearing words like those, you might figure González Torres for an anti-intellectual person, but this was not at all true. It's more appropriate to say that he often found influences and ideas by taking his own interpretations of theories of art and society into the world, into flea markets, for example, and that he often felt out of place in the straight white male environments of academia. In fact, he would emphasize, "the importance of reading '[Walter] Benjamin, Fanon, Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, Borges, Mattelart and others.'"

His approach was so effective that he was one of the few artists whose work I remember from childhood: his unique installation “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), a tribute to his late, beloved partner Ross Laycock, gave our third-grade class the opportunity to take home pieces of candy, and to re-evaluate our ideas of the limits and meanings of art. It made us part of his artwork, and that was a powerful feeling.

"How can you be feeling if you’re not in love?" he asked. "You need that space, you need that lifting up, you need that traveling in your mind that love brings, transgressing the limits of your body and your imagination. Total transgression."