jeff koons at the beyeler foundation

JEFF KOONS – FONDATION BEYELER, BASEL, SWITZERLAND
ON NOW THROUGH SEPTEMBER 2ND, 2012

opening in coincidence with art week basel with support from hugo boss and mercedes benz, the fondation beyeler presents an extensive exhibition of the american artist jeff koons, documenting his artistic development over the past thirty years of practice through the lenses of three milestone series. ‘the new’ showcases koons’s earliest work, as he began in the early 1980’s with a series of readymade-like appliances and sculptures. ‘banality’, a period begun in 1988, includes traditionally crafted sculptures in porcelain and wood, that nonetheless take as their subject ironic confrontations between pop culture icons and baroque artworks.

‘CELEBRATION’ brought together for the first time

perhaps koons’s most ambitious series to date is ‘celebration’, a collection of hyperrealistic large-scale stainless steel sculptures and large-format paintings, initiated in 1994 and brought together at the beyeler exhibition for the first time.

all works in ‘celebration’ reference memories of childhood, family, and holiday: balloon animals, hanging ornaments, play-doh, an easter egg, and birthday cake. at the same time, they are represented in imposing, room-size forms,
composed of high-alloy chrome steel, drawing attention to the contrast between their appearance of weightlessness and their heavy, stable reality.

the paintings in the series are based on arrangements of real objects created by the artist– with objects placed in front of draped, reflective foil– which were photographed, reworked via schematization, and then enlarged.

an interesting interaction among media forms is created at beyeler, where several of the sculptures are installed next to a painting of the same subject. the filling of entire rooms, or entire vistas, with the large-scale installations, creates a false sense of scale where viewers again return to the smallness of childhood.

in addition to the room-size installations, ‘celebration’ comprises smaller sculptural works of children’s icons. at first look, ‘titi’ and ‘elephant’ appear to be metallic foil balloons, belying the fact that these too are composed of heavy-weight stainless steel.

particularly representative of this conceptual basis is ‘split-rocker‘, a floral sculpture first presented by koons in avignon, france, in 2000 and now reinstated at the fondation beyeler. the sculpture departs from two designs of children’s rockers– a rocking horse, and a dinosaur. koons cut the heads of these objects in half and reassembled them, although their edges do not meet.

‘with the combination of pony and dinosaur,‘ exhibition curator theodora vischer offers, ‘‘split-rocker’ embodies that confrontation of opposites that is also expressed in the notion of a ‘monstrous’ , gigantic children’s toy. yet the artist chooses transitory flowers, of all things, as the material for a monument that promises duration. it is not least in this special interplay of supposed opposites that the true tension and force of koons’s art lie.‘

in the beyeler, the porcelain model of the sculpture koons designed for bernardaud is also on exhibition, offering the same mutability of medium highlighted in the ‘celebration’ series.