"Jeff Koons: Easyfun-Ethereal"
2000-10-27 until 2001-01-27
Guggenheim Museum, Berlin
Berlin, , DE

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.

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.

IMAGE:
Jeff Koons
Niagara, 2000
nearly finished state
Oil on Canvas, 3 x 4.3 m
Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin
© Jeff Koons

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