ART-PRESENTATION: Jeff Koons-Sculptures & Paintings

The series of works “Gazing Ball” takes its name from the mirrored spherical ornaments frequently found on lawns, gardens, and patios around Koons’s childhood home in Pennsylvania. Their unique visual qualities allow viewers to see around corners while absorbing them and their entire surroundings within one image. Koons has made use of highly reflective curved surfaces in his sculptures from the mid ‘80s onwards, and the gazing balls can be seen to echo the consummate attention to detail and materiality found throughout his oeuvre.

By Dimitris Lempesis

The power of Gazing Ball is to enable the observers to see the vastness around them, absorbing in the reflection of one’s own image and all the elements that surrounds one’s body. Fascinating, magical shapes that are to be enjoyed not only for their lightness (they are made of blown glass), but also for their association with generosity, and for their allusion to the fleeting duration of life as with soap bubbles. The first works of Jeff Koons that encapsulated the Gazing Ball was a series of sculptures that the artist exhibited at David Zwirner Gallery – New York (8/5-29/6/13). This is how Koons explains his work: “I have thought about the gazing ball for decades. I have wanted to show the affirmation, generosity, sense of place, and joy of the senses that the gazing ball symbolizes. The Gazing Ball series is based in transcendence. The realization of one’s mortality is an abstract thought and from there, one is able to have a concept of the external world, one’s family, community, and a vaster dialogue with humankind beyond the present”. The exhibition “Jeff Koons In Florence” is an ambitious and innovative plan providing for a meeting between the artist and Florentine Renaissance spaces and works, exploring the relationship between the provoking beauty of the works by the artist and the timeless masterpieces by Donatello and Michelangelo The locations chosen for such a juxtaposition are the Room of the Lilies in Palazzo Vecchio and Piazza della Signoria. The choice of exhibiting “Gazing Ball (Barberini Faun)” in the Room of the Lilies, decorated with precious frescoes by Domenico Ghirlandaio shows the intention of creating a dialogue between the Renaissance artistic language and the contemporary one. The room also hosts the original bronze sculpture by Donatello called “Judith and Holofernes”, one of the most fascinating and significant artworks of the 15th century. Facing Donatello’s masterpiece the Koons’s sculpture offers itself to the public with its revealing pose, an example of the beauty of the nude human body that is not vulgar, though pushed to a limit bordering the erotic. Other relations and meanings stem from Piazza della Signoria where, not far from the marble copy of Michelangelo’s “David”, a sculpture from Koon’s Antiquity series “Pluto and Proserpina”, is displayed. The newest works in the Gazing Ball series are the “Gazing Ball Paintings”. In this series, Koons is again in dialogue with artists of the past, such as Titian, El Greco, Courbet, and Manet, among others. Each work has a blue glass gazing ball that sits on a painted aluminum shelf attached to the front of the painting. The viewer and the painting are reflected in the gazing ball. This metaphysical occurrence connects the viewer to a family of cultural history in real time. Through the simple act of placing a gazing ball in front of the images, painting and sculpture are reunited for maximum sensory perception, as in ancient times.

Info: Jeff Koons in Florence, Palazzo Vecchio& Piazza della Signoria, Florence, Duration: 25/9-18/12/15, Days & Hours: Fri-Wed 9:00-23:00, Thu 9:00-14:00, www.musefirenze & Gazing Ball Paintings, Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street, New York, Duration: 9/11-23/12/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com