ART CITIES:N.York-Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons is one of of American artists that emerge in the 1980s with an aesthetic devoted to the decade’s pervasive consumer culture. Koons managed to shock the art world with one audacious work after another, from displaying commercial vacuum cleaners and basketballs as his own art to making porcelain reproductions of kitsch objects to showing homemade pornography.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

Following the enthusiastic public response to “Balloon Flower (Blue)” installed in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin in 1999, the Deutsche Guggenheim commissioned the first seven of the “Easyfun-Ethereal” paintings: mural-sized tableaux that combine cut-out photographs of packaged foods, fragments of faces, limbs, and hair, amusement park scenes, and paradisiacal landscapes into images of convulsive beauty. In his solo exhibition “Easyfun-Ethereal” Jeff Coons presents seven large-scale paintings, which were first presented together at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin in 2000. Three of the paintings are on generous loan from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Also on view, is “Woman Reclining” (2010–14), a granite sculpture from the “Antiquity” series. The ”Easyfun-Ethereal” series, which eventually expanded to twenty-four paintings, allowed Koons to work more spontaneously, in contrast to the detailed production demands of the “Celebration” sculptures. Working from computer-scanned reproductions taken from various printed media, as well as his own photographs, he considers the use of gesture, expression, and eroticism in artistic precedents and American advertising. Multilayered yet possessing a classical order, the resulting paintings marry the immediacy of collage with Romantic grandeur. In “Lips” (2000), two pairs of lips, swathes of silky brown hair, and a disembodied blue eye float among oversized corn niblets and streams of red-orange liquid, with a verdant South African vista in the background. As the title suggests, the black granite sculpture “Woman Reclining” depicts a female figure on a small divan, both legs raised over a planter filled with vivid blooming flowers. Like many of the paintings, it draws upon the potent visual memories of childhood, in this case Koons’s fascination with a novelty porcelain ashtray that sat on his grandfather’s table. The ashtray was in the form of a woman lying on her back holding a fan, her legs raised in the air. When a cigarette was set to rest beneath her legs, the smoke would activate them to rock back and forth.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 10/3-21/4/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com