Mitchell-Innes & Nash is pleased to present a survey of work by the collective General Idea (active 1969–1994), founded by AA Bronson (b. 1946, Vancouver), Felix Partz (b. 1945, Winnipeg; d. June 5, 1994, Toronto), and Jorge Zontal (b. 1944, Parma, Italy; d. February 3, 1994, Toronto).  
 
The group championed their identity as a triumvirate, a trouple, a "ménage à trois," as a normative family unit, whether through ziggurats and their ancient magical symbolism, cuddling triplet babies, or the three primary colors: red, blue, and green. They equally celebrated their queer identity and the stereotypes associated with poodles—the perfectly groomed and trained companions who always "aimed to please." 
 
The sense of fun and humor evaporates from the work by 1990 with the advent of the AIDS crisis, a disease whose scale and toll within their own community went largely unacknowledged by mainstream press, and the eventual diagnosis and death of Jorge Zontal and Felix Partz in 1994. Appropriating from the artists Ad Reinhardt and Robert Indiana, they painted black canvases, identical in size to Reinhardt's Untitled paintings of the 1950s and 60s, but instead of Reinhardt's subtle black bands, barely perceptible and mysteriously appearing on the canvas surface, they embedded the letters AIDS—an equally mysterious virus that portended certain death at the time. Robert Indiana's ubiquitous LOVE paintings and sculptures, celebrations of life and popular media and culture, are supplanted with the word AIDS in a similar font, inviting their audience to contemplate a grim reality that was entirely suppressed in the media at the time. 

General Idea worked in myth, of the artist, of desire, of identity, long before the instability of fact and fiction became a daily condition. General Idea built a practice around the understanding that culture is contagious, and that visibility—and existing within the very systems that seek to contain us—is itself a form of resistance.