Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Hauser & Wirth

A huge pile of brightly-coloured sweets, a billboard-sized photograph of an unmade bed, a vast curtain of plastic beads: Félix González-Torres's work uses opaque, minimalist gestures to reveal devastating realities. A gay man profoundly affected by HIV/AIDS, he produced works charged with love, loss, and life, amongst them some of the most disarmingly, heartbreakingly eloquent responses to the epidemic.

This retrospective at Hauser and Wirth will contain some of González-Torres's most profound work, including Portrait of Ross (1991), which looks at first just like thousands multicoloured sweets, which it is, but their total weight is exactly the same as the healthy bodyweight of González-Torres's partner, Ross Laycock, before he developed AIDS. The audience is instructed to eat from the pile, diminishing both its size and its weight, before it is replenished the next day in an infinite meditation on survival.

Much of González-Torres's art uses active processes – like eating the sweets – to invite its audience to bear witness to the tragedies of HIV/AIDS and the ferocious joys of love. Motivated by social and political causes throughout, he saw no separation between his private life and his artistic practice. This exhibition shows us both, with the same uncompromising honesty that shaped his too-short career.