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Almine Rech

Jeff Koons

Oct 4, 2016 — Jan 21, 2017 | London, Grosvenor Hill

Opening on Tuesday October 4th, 2016 from 6 to 8 pm

"Great artists are always complex and complicated figures. Unlike philosophers, they are also able to simplify matters, enabling understanding at a single glance by which all is revealed. Ut pictura poesis – ‘as is painting so is poetry’: an insight conjured by the Ancient Greeks and Romans. Mirrors from the very beginning have played an essential role in almost all of Jeff Koons’s work. They appear in the first inflatables of 1979, in which glass flowers and other ‘trite’ objects picked up in discount stores on 14th Street in New York were placed on mirrored platforms and backdrops. Since, many of his most ambitious works, such as the Balloon Swan, Balloon Monkey and Balloon Rabbit, shown spectacularly in New York in 2013, are finished with such shine that the viewer cannot but be aware of themselves many, many times as they circle the sculptures.

Koons goes further than Duchamp, who so famously described the viewer as the essential completer of the work of art, by literally embedding the viewer in his works of art, and as a result plays with their memories of childhood and, more recently, educated cultural experiences as they remember classical sculpture or the history of European painting dating from the Renaissance down to Picasso. Now for the first time he gives a nod and a wink to the originator of conceptualism, whose name is synonymous with art that makes pure and abstracted thought visible. At least that might be one way of describing the inventor of The Large Glass (1915-23). This all leads seamlessly into the concept of the blue glass gazing ball that Koons has now given, as though almost a gift, to some of the most decisive, at least as he regards them via museum encounters, masterpieces of Western European painting.

Press release

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Selected artworks

  • Jeff Koons,                                      Seated Ballerina, 2010-2015

    Jeff Koons Seated Ballerina, 2010-2015

    Mirror-polished Stainless Steel with Transparent Color Coating
    210,8 x 113,5 x 199,8 cm
    83 x 44 5/8 x 78 5/8 inches

  • Gazing Ball (Goltzius Hercules and Cacus), 2015

    Gazing Ball (Goltzius Hercules and Cacus), 2015

    Oil on canvas, glass and aluminium
    222,9 x 152,4 x 37,5 cm
    87 3/4 x 60 x 14 3/4 inches

  • Gazing Ball (Tintoretto The Origin of the Milky Way), 2016

    Gazing Ball (Tintoretto The Origin of the Milky Way), 2016

    Oil on canvas, glass and aluminium
    160 x 179,1 x 37,5 cm
    63 x 70 1/2 x 14 3/4 inches

  • Gazing Ball (Stool), 2013-2016

    Gazing Ball (Stool), 2013-2016

    Painted stainless steel, wood, glass, and aluminium
    33,7 x 33,7 x 101,8 cm
    13 1/4 x 13 1/4 x 40 1/8 inches
    Edition of 3 + 1 Artist proof

  • Gazing Ball (David Intervention of the Sabine Women), 2016

    Gazing Ball (David Intervention of the Sabine Women), 2016

    Oil on canvas, glass and aluminium
    165,1 x 224,2 x 37,5 cm
    65 x 88 1/4 x 14 3/4 inches

  • Jeff Koons,                                      Gazing Ball (Giotto The Kiss of Judas), 2015-2016

    Jeff Koons Gazing Ball (Giotto The Kiss of Judas), 2015-2016

    Oil on canvas, glass and aluminium
    166,4 x 165,1 x 37,5 cm
    65 1/2 x 65 x 14 3/4 inches

  • Jeff Koons,                                      Gazing Ball (Spranger Jupiter and Antiope), 2015

    Jeff Koons Gazing Ball (Spranger Jupiter and Antiope), 2015

    Oil on canvas, glass and aluminium
    186,7 x 136,5 x 37,5 cm
    73 1/2 x 53 3/4 x 14 3/4 inches

  • Jeff Koons,                                      Ballerinas, 2010-2014

    Jeff Koons Ballerinas, 2010-2014

    Mirror-polished stainless steel with transparent color coating
    254 x 177,8 x 157,5 cm
    100 x 70 x 62 inches
    Ed 1/3 + 1 AP

  • Jeff Koons,                                      Gazing Ball (Titian Pastoral Concert), 2016

    Jeff Koons Gazing Ball (Titian Pastoral Concert), 2016

    Oil on canvas, glass and aluminium
    152,4 x 188 x 37,5 cm
    60 x 74 x 14 3/4 inches

  • Jeff Koons,                                      Gazing Ball (Boucher Reclining Girl), 2014-2015

    Jeff Koons Gazing Ball (Boucher Reclining Girl), 2014-2015

    Oil on canvas, glass and aluminium
    176,1 x 117 cm
    69 3/8 x 46 1/8 inches

  • Jeff Koons,                                      Gazing Ball (Bottlerack), 2016

    Jeff Koons Gazing Ball (Bottlerack), 2016

    Galvanized steel and glass
    91,44 x 40,48 x 40,48 cm
    36 x 15 15/16 x 15 15/16 inches
    Ed 1/3 + 1 AP

  • Jeff Koons,                                      Gazing Ball (Poussin The Triumph of Pan), 2014-2016

    Jeff Koons Gazing Ball (Poussin The Triumph of Pan), 2014-2016

    Oil on canvas, glass and aluminium
    161,3 x 173,4 x 37,5 cm
    63 1/2 x 68 1/4 x 14 3/4 inches

More on Jeff Koons