THE ESTATE OF GENERAL IDEA GI Photographs_FINAL | Seite 2

General Idea
General Idea was formed in 1969 by AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal.
AA Bronson, born Michael Tims, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (born 1946). Felix Partz, born Ronald
Gabe, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, 1945 – 1994. Jorge Zontal, born Slobodan Saia-Levy, Parma, Italy,
1944 – 1994. The three artists worked and lived together until the deaths of Felix and Jorge in 1994.
General Idea founded Art Metropole, an artist archive and resource center in Toronto in 1974 and published
FILE Megazine between 1972 and 1989. The General Idea Archive is held at The National Gallery of Canada,
Ottawa.
Several major touring survey exhibitions of General Idea’s work have been held, including: Haute Culture:
General Idea. Une rétrospective, 1969 –1994, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris
and Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2011); General Idea Editions: 1967–1995, which toured to 18
venues between 2003 and 2007, including the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Centro Andaluz de Arte
Contemporaneo, Seville; Kunstverein München, Munich; Kunst-Werke, Berlin; Kunsthalle Zürich; Andy
Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto, Mississauga; Fin de siècle, which
toured between 1992 and 1993 to Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart; Centre d’Art Santa Mònica,
Barcelona; Kunstverein in Hamburg, The Power Plant, Toronto, Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Ohio State
University, Columbus, Ohio, and SFMOMA, San Francisco.
A major survey of the group’s oeuvre, curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio, artistic director of MALBA/Museo
de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, was presented at Museo Jumex in Mexico City from October
27, 2016 through February 11, 2017. The exhibition, entitled Broken Time, was on view at MALBA from
March through June, 2017. The catalogue raisonné of the complete works of General Idea will be published,
overseen by AA Bronson and Fern Bayer, in collaboration with Museo Jumex and MALBA in 2017.
General Idea’s work is represented in the collections of The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; The Grand Duke
Jean Museum of Modern Art (MUDAM), Luxembourg; The Hirschhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; Kunsthaus
Zürich; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’art
contemporain, Montréal; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; The Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Philadelphia; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam,
The Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Remai Modern, Saskatoon,
among others.
From May through September 2017, MAMCO in Geneva presented General Idea: Photographs 1969-1982
dedicated to the photographic work of General Idea.
A retrospective of General Idea’s work will take place at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in 2021.