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Indepth Arts News: "Jeff Koons: Easyfun-Ethereal" 2000-10-27 until 2001-01-27 Guggenheim Museum, Berlin Berlin, , DE
His suite of new paintings, commissioned for Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, will develop
from his recent series of mirror works and paintings entitled Easyfun. The oil paintings
from this group of works feature monumental tourist sites, children's cereals and toys,
luscious whipped cream toppings, and other aspects of popular culture. Working from
cut-out reproductions taken from the media, Koons combines familiar but unrelated
images to create collage-like paintings rendered with photo-realist perfection. These
works recall the advertising iconography and billboard-style painting technique present
in James Rosenquist's Pop art along with the disjunctive juxtapositions seen in David
Salle's work. Yet by comparison, Koons compress his imagery into the foreground of
his works, treating his subjects as purposefully flat, opaque images that seem to deny
any specific social critique or psychological charge. Instead, his imagery emphasizes
complete and total self-gratification, celebrating an ever-wanting child's consumption of
popular culture.
As part of a group of artists from the 1980s seeking populist idioms to explore the
collapse of art and language, Jeff has emerged as the most important international artist
of his generation. His work has been the subject of many exhibitions both in the United
States and Europe, including major museum retrospectives organized by the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1992/1993. In
May of this year Koons mounted a new floral sculpture entitled Split-Rocker in Avignon
and in June recreated his Puppy from 1992 for Rockefeller Center in New York.
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Farwell Week at the Old de Young Museum Shirley Wiitasalo, Candida Höfer, Christine Davis Mysteries of Egypt and Women of the Nile Pieter Saenredam, the Utrecht work The Visual Art of John Cage: To Sober and Quiet the Mind Arte Latino: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum The Blue Rider Artists: Works from the Busch-Reisinger Museum and other Collections TURNER: THE GREAT WATERCOLOURS Susann Walder: A Very Merry Chirstmas Show 2000 Painterly Photographs: The Raymond E. Kassar Collection Call to Artists: Mish, Mosh and More LIGHT x EIGHT: THE HANUKKAH PROJECT 2000 Hannah Barrett and Henry Samelson Picturing the Past: Piranesi to Pearlstein Carsten Hoeller: Synchro System PETER FISCHLI, DAVID WEISS: Visible World, Suddenly this Overview, Big Questions – Small Questions der körpererfüllte Raum fort und fort : the body-filled space goes on and on Humanity Refigured: Henry Moore and Postwar British Sculpture |
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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 and the attendent crisis of
representation. With his stated artistic intention to communicate with the masses,
Koons draws from the visual language of advertising, marketing, and the entertainment
industry. Testing the limits between high and low culture, his sculptural menagerie
includes Plexiglas-encased Hoover vaccum clearners, basketballs floating in glass
aquariums, porcelain homages to Michael Jackson and the Pink Panther. In extending the
lineage of Dadaism and Duchamp, and integrating references to more recent histories of
Minimalism and Pop, Koons stages art as a commodity that cannot be placed within the
hierarchy of conventional aesthetics.