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Jeff Koons
Easyfun - Ethereal
October 27, 2000 until January 14, 2001
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 attendant crisis of representation. From October 27, 2000 to January 14, 2001 Deutsche Guggenheim presents with Jeff Koons: Easyfun - Ethereal seven new large-format paintings by the New York artist.
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 attendant 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 vacuum cleaners, basketballs floating in glass aquariums, and porcelain homages to Michael Jackson and the Pink Panther. In extending the lineage of Dada and Duchamp, and integrating references to Minimalism and Pop art, Koons stages art as a commodity that cannot be placed within the hierarchy of conventional aesthetics.
Entitled Easyfun-Ethereal, Koons's new series of work commissioned for Deutsche Guggenheim features food, fashion, and fun. His seven large-scale paintings reveal enormous chocolate swirls and happy-face deli sandwiches, moist lips covered in lipstick and rich hues of hair color, as well as spiraling roller coaster rides and playful Halloween costumes. Working from computer-scanned reproductions taken from the media, Koons combines familiar yet sometimes 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. Yet by comparison, Koons's work exudes a sense of excess and effervescence; he compresses 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 implications. Instead, his imagery emphasizes complete and total self-gratification, celebrating adult sexual desire and allure, as well as an ever-wanting child's consumption of popular culture.
Although Koons's imagery overflows with familiar icons from everyday life, the artist has clarified his specific purpose in employing elements of kitsch. In reference to an earlier group of paintings also called Easyfun (1999), from which his new paintings derive, Koons said in an interview: "I've worked with things that are sometimes labeled as kitsch; but I've never had an interest in kitsch per se. I always try to give viewers self-confidence-a foundation within themselves. For me, my work is about the viewer more than anything else." Koons's work is infused with elements of the Baroque; the swirling, uplifting imagery depicted in his new body of work is designed to entice the viewer, to create optimism and instill in his viewer "confidence and security."
Koons's new brand of Pop painting cleverly engages other art-historical references, in particular Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. In looking at such a work as Lips, one is confronted by the disjunctive free-floating fantasy. The disembodied succulent lips and drifting lush-lashed singular eye recall the work of René Magritte, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalí, while the surrounding streams and splashes of juice refer to abstractions like none other than Jackson Pollock.
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Indeed, Koons makes direct reference to the latter in another painting; although the title Blue Poles describes the support posts for a roller coaster, it is borrowed from one of the later works by the modern master. In his new series Easyfun-Ethereal, Koons engages both past and present, employing the new technology of computer imagery while recalling various movements from art history. His fusion of Pop representations with Surrealist and abstract overtones creates a hybrid of fun and fantasy, forming a body of work that depicts gravity-less forms of dreamlike pleasure.
As part of a group of artists from the 1980s seeking populist idioms to explore the collapse of art and language, Koons 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 at the Palais des Papes in Avignon and in June recreated his Puppy from 1992 for Rockefeller Center in New York. The exhibition is curated by Lisa Dennison, Chief Curator and Deputy Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Robert Rosenblum, Stephen Swid Curator of the Twentieth Century Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The catalogs will be published in German and English, priced at DM 59.
A Paddle-Ball-Game produced together with the artist forms Edition No. 13 from Deutsche Guggenheim. With its reindeer motif, this game of skill in wood makes an ideal Christmas present. A small number of the limited edition of one thousand are signed by the artist and available exclusively from the museum shop for DM xxx.00.
The supporting program will be launched by Koons expert and co-curator Robert Rosenblum. His lecture, delivered in English and entitled Jeff Koons: An Art Historian's View, will begin at 8 p.m. on Friday, October 27, 2000.
"Art, a weekend of art. The bar and the studio, the gallery and the stooped....." - the theater play Jeff Koons by the German literary figure Rainald Goetz caused quite a stir in Hamburg in 1999. The author will be giving one of his rare public readings from this work for Deutsche Guggenheim at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, November 8. Collaboration with other institutions in the city has been a key component of the work undertaken by Deutsche Guggenheim right from the outset. As part of the 14th Berlin Festival of Jewish Culture - which will focus on Italy this year - Philip Rylands, Director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, will be giving a lecture on the legendary collector entitled Peggy Guggenheim - Patroness of the Avant-Garde at 7.30 p.m. on Saturday, November 18. This will be followed by a Peggy Guggenheim Night with music and wine in the atrium of Deutsche Bank, an event organized by Deutsche Guggenheim in cooperation with the 14th Berlin Festival of Jewish Culture.
The final event in the incidental program is the now traditional family brunch for adults and children alike, which will be held at 11.30 p.m. on Sunday, December 10, 2000.
Deutsche Guggenheim is a partner of .Kunstherbst Berlin
Press Preview: Thursday, Ocotber 26, 2000, 11 a.m.
Images of the exhibition
are available online at www.photo-files.de/guggenheim in a 300 dpi quality.
Further information at
Manager: Svenja Gräfin von Reichenbach
Press: Sara Bernshausen
Phone: +49-30-202093-14
Fax: +49-30-202093-20
email: berlin.guggenheim@db.com
Internet: www.deutsche-guggenheim.de
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