MIRAGE 

Monsieur Zohore

October 17th – November 21st, 2026

Opening Reception: October 17th 5-8PM

 KDR is pleased to present Mirage, a solo exhibition of new works by Monsieur Zohore, his second with the gallery. 

What becomes of an artist’s life once the work survives its author?

MIRAGE proposes an impossible collaboration between Zohore and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, two queer and diasporic artists whose lives briefly overlapped. Zohore was born in 1993, during Gonzalez-Torres’s final years, before his untimely death in 1996 from AIDS. The exhibition takes that coincidence as time spent together and the decades since as a relationship sustained by study, influence, desire, and making. 

That imagined relationship is staged in Miami. Much of Zohore’s practice subjects place to autopsy and indictment, pulling apart its histories, habits, violences, and contradictions. MIRAGE, however, begins from a rarer impulse: affection. 

At its heart, MIRAGE is a buddy-cop comedy about the time Monsieur Zohore and Felix Gonzalez-Torres spent together.

They never met.

Mirage and mirror share an etymological root in the Latin mirari: to look at, to wonder at, to regard with astonishment. A mirage bends light so that an object appears somewhere other than where it is. Zohore uses photographs, films, songs, landscapes, and events from the years both artists were alive to manufacture encounters between them. He takes the mirror literally. Mirrors, reflective materials, and illuminated surfaces recur throughout MIRAGE, so that anyone looking at the work eventually catches someone looking back. 

In 2011, Doug Ashford, an artist, educator, and fellow member of “Group Material” alongside Felix, told Zohore a story about visitors carrying sheets from a Gonzalez-Torres paper stack out of the Guggenheim and abandoning them in trash cans along Fifth Avenue. The story helped shape Zohore’s longstanding interest in eucharistic and disposable materials, particularly the paper towels he prints, stains, cuts, and tiles the towels, then wraps them around paintings and sculptures, moving them between image, object, skin, and refuse.

In Untitled (Revenge Deux), 1996–2026, the story becomes material. Zohore brings stacked sheets from Sweet Revenge, Gonzalez-Torres’s exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, to Miami and places them in a 1996 New York City trash can. He asks the audience to salvage the sheets, repeating Ashford’s story with a different ending.

Throughout his practice, Zohore’s work has centered on mourning and on what loss asks the living to do with what remains. Camp, slapstick, pop music, sexual innuendo, and bad jokes sit comfortably beside death and grief because solemnity has never served as Zohore’s measure of seriousness. In MIRAGE, that inquiry turns toward stewardship. Who takes responsibility for an artist’s oeuvre once the artist can no longer speak for the work?
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Gonzalez-Torres built that question into the future of his practice. He embedded Ross, AIDS, queer life, migration, politics, grief, and love within works he also designed to remain open to changing audiences and circumstances. The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation carries that structure forward, advising exhibitors while emphasizing the latitude Felix granted them in realizing and interpreting the work. That latitude has not been frictionless. As recently as 2024, a major museum presentation placed Ross and AIDS at a remove from the work itself, prompting public criticism. In 2026, institutional presentations have shifted conspicuously, naming AIDS, queerness, Ross, and biography more directly while continuing to emphasize the work’s openness. Felix made room for both from the beginning.

Museums hold Felix in works, labels, and exhibition histories. The Foundation carries him through certificates, archives, and the conditions under which the work continues; family and friends hold objects, stories, photographs, habits, and memories that never entered those systems. In Untitled (Pietà), 197?–2026, Zohore gathers these forms of care into a mirrored closet containing personal effects loaned by the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Family Foundation. Throughout the exhibition, he periodically opens the closet for white-glove encounters with the archive and conversations with Felix’s family, friends, and historians, allowing memories, corrections, and disagreements to surface. 

Zohore has spent fifteen years carrying another Felix through looking, stealing, loving, misremembering, and making.

These forms of care meet, diverge, and sometimes make incompatible claims on the same person. They all refer to Felix Gonzalez-Torres, but they do not carry exactly the same man.

That is the mirage.