ART PRESENTATION: Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean
Jeff Koons is one of America’s most popular contemporary artists. His Neo-Pop aesthetics anappropriations of consumer objects, express a reverence for popular culture. Jeff Koons was among the first American artists to cast himself as a populist. In the rising economy of the 1980s, his message resonated with audiences sick of art world elitism. His outspoken distaste for abstract art, already fading from fashion, vaulted him into the limelight.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Ashmolean Museum Archive
A major exhibition of the work of Jeff Koons is held at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the show features 17 important works, that span the artist’s entire career and his most well-known series including “Equilibrium”, “Statuary”, “Banality”, “Antiquity” and his recent “Gazing Ball” sculptures and paintings. From his earliest works Koons has explored the readymade and appropriated image – using unadulterated found objects, and creating painstaking replicas of ancient sculptures and Old Master paintings which almost defy belief in their craftsmanship and precision. Throughout his career he has pushed at the boundaries of contemporary art practice, stretching the limits of what is possible. The exhibition includes important works from the 1980s with which Koons made his name through the novel use of the readymade and the appropriation of popular imagery: “One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Spalding Dr. J 241 Series)” (1985), “Rabbit” (1986); and “Ushering in Banality” (1988). It also explores Koons’s more recent focus on the art of antiquity and the western art canon where layered images of ancient and modern art meet in Koons’s singular vision. Among the highlights is “Balloon Venus (Magenta)” (2008-12). While evoking the tiny Ice Age “Venus of Willendorf”, one of the world’s oldest works of art, “Balloon Venus (Magenta)” is made with Koons’s signature motifs: monumental scale; the inflated balloon with its intimations of transience and mortality and the flawless mirror-polished surface which positions the viewer in the work. In his “Antiquity paintings” (2009- ) Koons creates thrilling, layered collages. Photo-realist reproductions of classical sculptures (of Venus, Pan and Priapus) are set against broken collages of other artworks or dazzling abstract backgrounds, overlaid with graffiti-like marks. In more recent works, Koons has explored what he calls his ‘cultural DNA’, using sculptures and paintings from world-famous collections which have personal meaning for him. The “Gazing Ball” series (2012- ) positions perfectly blown reflective glass spheres on casts of ancient sculptures, meticulously painted replicas of European masterpieces, and museum-style plastercasts of mundane objects such as mailboxes and birdbaths. They continue Koons’s experiments with the remade readymade the meeting of high art and the vernacular, while engaging in a new way with the art of the past.
Info: Curator: Jeff Koons and Norman Rosenthal, Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont Street, Oxford, Oxfordshire, Duration: 7/2-9/6/19, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-17:00, www.ashmolean.org