While Koons’s previous art-historical references spanned decades or centuries, in Antiquity he looks across millennia to Paleolithic and classical precedents that evoke the themes of love, beauty, and desire.
Expanding on the lowbrow subjects of Statuary, Koons’s next series, Banality, ventured further into the realm of kitsch. Unlike his earlier sculptures based on readymade sources, those in Banality are mash-ups of stuffed animals, gift shop figurines, and images taken from magazines, product packaging, films, and even Leonardo da Vinci. Nothing was too corny, too cloying, or too cute.
Koons conceived his series Celebration in 1994 as a paean to the milestones that mark a year and the cycle of life. Fittingly, it was inspired by an invitation to design a calendar for which he created photographs that referred to holidays and other joyous events.
Koons created Easyfun in 1999, during one of the most difficult periods of his artistic and personal life. His marriage to Ilona Staller ended acrimoniously, and she abducted their young son to Italy.
Easyfun and Easyfun-Ethereal signal the start of Koons’s engagement with hand-painted oils on canvas, a medium he continues to use today.
Koons staged his first solo gallery exhibition, Equilibrium, in 1985. The show presented a multilayered allegory of, in Koons’s words, unattainable “states of being” or salvation. Cast-bronze floatation devices, for example, maintained a permanent inflatedness, yet they would kill rather than save their users.
Koons has long been known for works that reinvent readymade sources and cross the wires between popular culture and art, as is evident in his most recent series, Gazing Ball. He took his inspiration from the plaster casts traditionally used to introduce students and museumgoers to antique statues in academies and towns that lacked genuine examples.
With Hulk Elvis, Koons extended and complicated his renewed interest in the readymade, employing cutting-edge technologies to further blur the distinction between real things and their copies.
Inflatable Flower and Bunny (Tall White, Pink Bunny), 1979. Vinyl and mirrors; 32 × 25 × 19 in. (81.3 × 63.5 × 48.3 cm).
Jeff Koons, Inflatable Flowers (Short Pink, Tall Purple), 1979. Vinyl, mirrors, and acrylic; 16 × 25 × 18 in. (40.6 × 63.5 × 45.7 cm)
The works in Luxury and Degradation address the marketing and consumption of alcohol to raise questions about the relationships among advertising, class, vice, and art.
If with Banality Koons proposed to liberate his audience from the stigma of bad taste, with Made in Heaven he promised nothing less than emancipation from the shame of sex.
The Popeye series is named after the cartoon sailor featured in some of its works, yet its true subject may be the artist’s strategic reexamination of the readymade.
Jeff Koons, ,1979. Teapot, plastic tubes, and fluorescent lights; 26 × 9 × 13 in. (66 × 22.9 × 33 cm).
