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Indepth Arts News:
"Jeff Koons: Three Groups of Work Represent His Most Extensive Show in Nearly 10 Years"
2001-07-18 until 2001-09-16
Kunsthaus Bregenz
Bregenz, ,
AT
With 21 large format works from the years 1995-2001, the Kunsthaus
Bregenz presents the most extensive Jeff Koons exhibition
since the retrospective of 1992/93. The exhibition brings together
three groups of work in which the central ideas of Jeff Koons
work become focused. The show is not a retrospective, but rather
it offers an artists view of the idea of the connections between
surface and depth, between painting and object, between tradition
and modernity.
Therefore, in close cooperation with the artist,
we have chosen works from the Celebration series as well as new
paintings and mirrors from the Easyfun series and new paintings
from the Easyfun-Ethereal series. In the contrast between the
childs view in the Celebration and Easyfun mirror-series and
the adults view in the new paintings, this selection presents the
brilliance of Jeff Koons works in their breaking of European tradition,
from Renaissance and Baroque all the way to Surrealism. This
artistic approach is expanded and continued with the American
tradition of Hyperrealism, Pop, and Minimalism, tied into the
positive rationalism of affirmative communication through the
ideas of the aesthetic and the object.
Each work group is shown as a unified cyle, each on a
separate exhibition floor. The visitor thus wanders in a baroque
spiral through the complexity and uniqueness of the individual
groups of work and of the whole presentation. The selection
of works is deliberately limited to key works. It makes possible,
for the first time in Europe - and especially through the integration
of new works - a new view of Jeff Koons exceptional position
as an artist and as a stimulator of a new way of seeing the world.
The American artist Jeff Koons (born 1955 in York, Pennsylvania,
lives in New York) studied from 1972-1975 at the Maryland Institute
of Art in Baltimore and 1975/76 at the Art Institute of Chicago before
moving to New York in 1977. He financed his first artworks with his
earnings as a stockbroker. In the eighties, he became the star of the
New York art scene with aesthetic productions of banal household
appliances in luxurious display cases and with the Equilibrium
Tanks, tanks filled with water in which basketballs float.
Soon thereafter, figures made of high polish high-grade steel
and rococo-like porcelain figures of postmodern icons such as
Michael Jackson and the Pink Panther were created, which he in
part had produced by craftsmen in South Tyrol following picture-
and color models. These technically perfectly produced pieces
represent an ingeniuous mixture of kitsch, sex, and modernity and
popularize Marcel Duchamps idea of the readymade, introduced
at the beginning of the 20th century.
Taking his orientation along the lines of mainstream culture
to even further extremes, Koons, in the late eighties, focused
increasingly on the topic of pornography. In 1991, at the height of
his success, he married the Italian porno star Cicciolina and made
the relationship the subject of his art. The series of works Made
in Heaven (1991), which shows Koons with his wife as larger-than-Iife
figures having sex, gained him widespread international attention.
In 1992/93, Koons, meanwhile divorced from Cicciolina, showed
his complete works in a travelling exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum
in Amsterdam, the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, and the Museum of
Modern Art in San Francisco, among other institutions.
Since the mid-nineties Koons has been working on the series
Easyfun, Easyfun-Ethereal and on Celebration, his largest project
so far, which comprises numerous monumental sculptures and
paintings.
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Access:
Vienna (68)
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