One Response “Jeff Koons – Art makes something of the Banal.” →Jeff Koons – Art makes something of the Banal.
"Puppy" in Sydney Australia
Jeffrey “Jeff” Koons is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces. He lives and works in New York City and his hometown York, Pennsylvania. This is an exciting contribution for me, because I was lucky enough to see “Puppy” when it was here in Sydney.
Koons’ work has sold for substantial sums of money including at least one world record auction price for a work by a living artist. The largest sum known to be paid for a work by Koons is Balloon flower (Magenta) which was sold for £12,921,250 (US$25,765,204) at Christie’s London on June 30, 2008 (Lot 00012) in the Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale.
Balloon Flower Magenta
Critics are sharply divided in their views of Koons. Some view his work as pioneering and of major art-historical importance. Others dismiss his work as kitsch: crass and based on cynical self-merchandising. Koons has stated that there are no hidden meanings in his works, nor any critiques.
Work
Jeff Koons rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art in a media-saturated era. He gained recognition in the 1980s and subsequently set up a factory-like studio in a SoHo loft on the corner of Houston and Broadway in New York. It was staffed with over 30 assistants, each assigned to a different aspect of producing his work—in a similar mode as Andy Warhol‘s Factory (notable because all of his work is produced using a method known as Art fabrication). Today, he has a 1,500 m2 (16,000 sq ft) factory in Chelsea with 90 regular assistants. Koons developed a color-by-numbers system, so that each of his assistants could execute his canvases and sculptures as if they had been done “by a single hand”.
The New and Equilibrium series
Koons’s early work was in the form of conceptual sculpture, an example of which is a series of vacuum-cleaners, often selected for brand names which appealed to the artist and which he had mounted in Perspex boxes. Another example isThe Equilibrium Series (1985), consisting of one to three basketballs floating in distilled water, a project Koons had researched with the help of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. The Total Equilibrium Tanks are completely filled with distilled water and a small amount of sodium chloride reagent, to assist the hollow balls in remaining suspended in the centre of the liquid. In a second version, the 50/50 Tanks, only half the tank is filled with distilled water, with the result that the balls float half in and half out of the water.
Statuary series
Koons started creating sculptures using inflatable toys in the 1970s. Taking a readymade inflatable rabbit Koons cast the object in highly polished stainless steel, resulting in Rabbit (1986), one of his most famous artworks. Originally part of the private collection of Ileana Sonnabend, Rabbit is today owned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. A proof of the sculptur is owned by Eli Broad.
The Rabbit has since returned to its original soft form, and, many times larger at more than 50 feet high, taken to the air. On October 13, 2009, the giant metallic monochrome color rabbit used during the Macy’s Thanksgiving day parade was put on display for Nuit Blanche in the Eaton Centre in Toronto.
Made in Heaven series
In 1989 the Whitney Museum asked Koons to make an artwork about the media on a billboard for the show “Image World: Art and Media Culture”. Koons employed Ilona Staller as a model in the shoot that formed the basis of the resulting work for the Whitney, Made in Heaven (1990–91). The series of paintings, photographs, and sculptures portrayed the Koons and Staller in explicit sexual positions and created considerable controversy. It was first shown at the 1990Venice Biennale. In celebration of the Made in Heaven’s 20th anniversary, Luxembourg & Dayan chose to present a redux edition of the series that ran through January 21, 2011.
Banality series
Koons then moved on to the Banality series that culminated in 1988 with Michael Jackson and Bubbles, a series of three life-size gold-leaf plated porcelain statues of the sitting singer cuddling Bubbles, his pet chimpanzee. Three years later, one of these sold at Sotheby’s New York for $5.6 million. Two of these sculptures are now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The statue was included in a 2004 retrospective at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo which traveled a year later to the Helsinki City Art Museum. It also featured in his second retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 2008.
Anticipating a less than generous critical response to his 1988 Banality series exhibition, with all of his new objects made in an edition of three, allowing for simultaneous, identical shows at galleries in New York, Cologne, and Chicago, Koons devised the Art Magazine Ads series (1988-89). Placed in Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, and Art News, the ads were designed as promotions for his own gallery exhibitions. Arts journalist Arifa Akbar reported for The Independent that in “an era when artists were not regarded as ‘stars’, Koons went to great lengths to cultivate his public persona by employing an image consultant.” Featuring photographs by Matt Chedgey, Koons placed “advertisements in international art magazines of himself surrounded by the trappings of success” and gave interviews “referring to himself in the third person.:
Puppy
Koons was not among the 44 American artists selected to exhibit his work in Documenta 9 in 1992, but was commissioned by three art dealers to create a piece for nearby Arolsen Castle in Bad Arolsen, Germany. The result was Puppy, a 43 ft (13 m) tall topiary sculpture of a West Highland White Terrier puppy, executed in a variety of flowers on a steel substructure. In 1995, the sculpture was dismantled and re-erected at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Sydney Harbour on a new, more permanent, stainless steel armature with an internal irrigation system. The piece was purchased in 1997 by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and installed on the terrace outside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Before the dedication at the museum, anEuskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) trio disguised as gardeners attempted to plant explosive-filled flowerpots near the sculpture,[22] but was foiled by Basque police officer Jose María Aguirre, who then was shot dead by ETA members. Currently the square in which the statue is placed bears the name of Aguirre. In the summer of 2000, the statue traveled to New York City for a temporary exhibition at Rockefeller Center.
Media mogul Peter Brant and his wife, model Stephanie Seymour, commissioned Koons to create a duplicate of the Bilbao statue Puppy (1993) for their Connecticut estate, the Brant Foundation Art Study Center. In 1998, a miniature version of Puppy was released as a white glazed porcelain vase, in an edition of 3000.
Celebration series
Celebration, a series of large-scale sculptures and paintings of balloon dogs, Valentine hearts and Easter eggs, was conceived in 1994. Some of the pieces are still being fabricated. Each of the 20 different sculptures in the series comes in five differently colored “unique versions”, including the artist’s proof, all in high-chromium stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces. Koons began the series with Balloon Dog in 1994, based on balloons twisted into the shape of a toy dog. He later made ten monumental Easter Eggs with ribbon, each one uniquely colored, between 1994 and 2008; five have a smooth surface (Smooth Egg) and the other eggs seem to be packed in crumpled foil (Baroque Egg). The two-part Cracked Egg sculptures are the only works in the series in which fracture or assault of the shiny surface has taken place.
Cracked Egg Blue
Cracked Egg (Blue) won the 2008 Charles Wollaston Award for the most distinguished work in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. His later work Tulips (1995–2004) consists of a bouquet of multicolor balloon flowers blown up to gargantuan proportions (more than 2 m (6.6 ft) tall and 5 m (16 ft) across).
Blue Diamond
Koons was pushing to finish the series in time for a 1996 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, but the show was ultimately canceled because of production delays and cost overruns. The artist convinced his primary collectors Dakis Joannou, Peter Brant, and Eli Broad, along with dealers Jeffrey Deitch, Anthony d’Offay, and Max Hetzler, to invest heavily in the costly fabrication of the Celebration series. The dealers funded the project in part by selling works to collectors before they were fabricated.
In 2006, Koons presented Hanging Heart, a 9 feet tall highly polished, steel heart, one of a series of five differently colored examples, part of his Celebration series. Large sculptures from that series were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2008.
Play Doh
Just saw Jeffs exhibition here in Frankfurt and I was very surprised and glad to see something that made me smile and reflect on historical similarities and differences!
The movie show a very humble and positive person!
It was really good!
