{"id":21397,"date":"2009-03-17T22:33:31","date_gmt":"2009-03-18T02:33:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zeitgeistworld.com\/?p=21397"},"modified":"2013-05-20T22:33:50","modified_gmt":"2013-05-21T02:33:50","slug":"jeff-koons-new-paintings-and-sculpture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zeitgeistworld.com\/?p=21397","title":{"rendered":"Jeff Koons \u201cNew Paintings and Sculpture\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.zeitgeistworld.com\/?attachment_id=21398\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-21398\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-21398\" alt=\"jeff-koons-new-paintings-and-sculpture-at-gagosian-new-york-11\" src=\"https:\/\/www.zeitgeistworld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/jeff-koons-new-paintings-and-sculpture-at-gagosian-new-york-11-560x373.jpg\" width=\"560\" height=\"373\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.zeitgeistworld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/jeff-koons-new-paintings-and-sculpture-at-gagosian-new-york-11-560x373.jpg 560w, https:\/\/www.zeitgeistworld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/jeff-koons-new-paintings-and-sculpture-at-gagosian-new-york-11.jpg 620w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 560px) 100vw, 560px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.gagosian.com\/exhibitions\/jeff-koons--may-11-2013\">Gagosian Gallery <\/a>is pleased to present Jeff Koons\u2019s first major exhibition at Gagosian New York, following exhibitions at Gagosian London and Gagosian Los Angeles over the last decade. It takes the form of a rich sampling of several major bodies of recent work, demonstrating how Koons&#8217;s themes and formal approaches continue to overlap and interpenetrate across time.<\/p>\n<p>With sources as diverse as children\u2019s art, comic-book characters, and figures from classical antiquity, Koons continues to draw a common thread through cultural history, creating works that attempt to touch the core of the human psyche. Working through conceptual constructs including the new, the banal, and the sublime, he has taken his work from its literal, deadpan beginnings in readymades to baroque creations that extol innocence, beauty, sexuality, and happiness in confounding combinations of abstraction, figuration, sumptuous effect, and pure spectacle.<\/p>\n<p>The\u00a0<em>Antiquity\u00a0<\/em>paintings (2009\u201313) pulse with complex layerings of image, reference, and chromatic nuance as Koons explores the historical oscillation of form in painting and sculpture, the movement back and forth between two and three dimensions, that underpins so much of his own artwork.\u00a0 At the center of each scene is a famous ancient or classical sculpture\u2014so meticulously rendered in oil paint as to suggest both the third dimension and the stone out of which it is carved\u2014symbolizing love, ardor, potency or fertility. Images of popular figurines or figures of popular culture, scaled to the same size as the sculptures, serve to further conflate the aesthetic registers of each painterly composition. The equally detailed backdrops include an Arcadian vision, a tiling of other artworks, and an expressionistic abstraction.<\/p>\n<p>Two outsized\u00a0<em>Venus\u00a0<\/em>sculptures in mirror-polished stainless steel are the first sculptures to be completed in the\u00a0<em>Antiquity\u00a0<\/em>series.\u00a0 In one, Koons represents the much emulated classical erotic subject, The Callipygian Venus or Venus of the round buttocks, as a gleaming turquoise monochrome.\u00a0 The other is an astonishing interpretation of one of the world\u2019s earliest known sculptures, the fecund Venus of Willendorf.\u00a0 The extreme contours of the original small figurine, transposed into a twisted balloon and enlarged to a colossal scale, become a complex of reflective magenta curves approaching total abstraction.<\/p>\n<p>Works from the series\u00a0<em>Hulk Elvis<\/em>\u00a0range from precision-machined bronze sculptures, inspired by inflatable toys and extruded in three dimensions from popular cartoon sources, to granite monoliths.\u00a0<em>Hulk (Wheelbarrow)<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<em>Cannonballs (Hulk)<\/em>\u00a0are polychromed sculptures conceived simultaneously with the\u00a0<em>Hulk Elvis<\/em>\u00a0paintings of 2007.\u00a0 A black granite sculpture standing eight feet tall,\u00a0<em>Gorilla\u00a0<\/em>recalls Emmanuel Fr\u00e9meit\u2019s\u00a0<em>Gorilla Carrying off a Woman<\/em>\u00a0(1887), which influenced\u00a0<em>King Kong<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0<em>Gorilla\u00a0<\/em>is based on a toy model that Koons purchased from a souvenir-vending machine at the Los Angeles Zoo.<\/p>\n<p>The\u00a0<em>Celebration\u00a0<\/em>series, which Koons began working on twenty years ago, was inspired by an enduring fascination with childhood experiences and childlike consciousness.\u00a0 In dialogue with this body of work are three new sculptures\u00a0<em>Balloon Swan (Blue)<\/em>,\u00a0<em>Balloon Rabbit (Yellow)<\/em>, and\u00a0<em>Balloon Monkey (Red)<\/em>, for which children\u2019s party favors are reconceived as mesmerizing monumental forms. With their impressive scale, fluid lines, and immaculate, mirror-like surfaces, they achieve a perfect tension between representation and abstraction.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>Gagosian Gallery<\/em>, 555 W 24th St bet 1oth &amp; 11th Aves, NYC, 212-741-1111, through June 29th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\nGagosian Gallery is pleased to present Jeff Koons\u2019s first major exhibition at Gagosian New York, following exhibitions at Gagosian London and Gagosian Los Angeles over the last decade. It takes the form of a rich sampling of several major bodies of recent work, demonstrating how Koons&#8217;s themes and formal approaches continue to overlap and interpenetrate [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[717,1751,766,3026,836],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zeitgeistworld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21397"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zeitgeistworld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zeitgeistworld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeitgeistworld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeitgeistworld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21397"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeitgeistworld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21401,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeitgeistworld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21397\/revisions\/21401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zeitgeistworld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeitgeistworld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeitgeistworld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}