{"id":302030,"date":"2025-11-19T22:54:16","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T22:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/302030\/"},"modified":"2025-11-19T22:54:16","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T22:54:16","slug":"jeff-koonss-first-new-york-show-in-seven-years-is-dreadfully-dull","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/302030\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeff Koons\u2019s First New York Show in Seven Years Is Dreadfully Dull"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tJeff Koons<\/a>\u2019s \u201cBanality\u201d sculptures of the late 1980s are anything but ordinary: few can easily forget the sight of the Pink Panther embracing a partially naked woman, for one. But there\u2019s nothing quite so out of the ordinary about the artist\u2019s recent creations such as his 2016\u201321 sculpture Aphrodite, an eight-and-half-foot-tall nude that made its public debut at Gagosian<\/a> gallery in New York last week. Standing before it, I felt so unstimulated that I wished I were somewhere else entirely.<\/p>\n

\n\tA stainless-steel goddess based on a porcelain figurine by the Royal Dux company, Aphrodite has an unnaturally smooth surface and a towering scale, putting it less in line with Botticelli\u2019s Birth of Venus than the alien at the end of the 2018 film Annihilation. In theory, Aphrodite should succeed in awing viewers by making them feel small or seduced. But the sculpture, and all the others in this show, can\u2019t even accomplish this basic task. Enabled by a seemingly limitless amount of money and technical willpower, Koons has produced a body of work that\u2019s just as banal as the tchotchkes that once inspired him\u2014not that that will necessarily deter his collectors, of course.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

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\n\tYou\u2019d be forgiven for wanting something more provocative\u2014especially because it\u2019s been seven years since Koons last had a solo show in New York, the city where his sprawling studio is based. Between this show and the last one in New York, also at Gagosian, Koons became the world\u2019s most expensive living artist<\/a>, with his 1986 sculpture Rabbit selling for $91.1 million in 2019. He departed Gagosian and David Zwirner for their mega-gallery competitor, Pace, then returned to Gagosian<\/a> once more, and faced two lawsuits over his art, winning<\/a> one and losing<\/a> the other.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tKoons\u2019s Aphrodite (2016\u201321) towers over viewers.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Christopher Garcia Valle\/ARTnews<\/p>\n

\n\tThe last time Koons premiered a new series in New York was even longer ago\u20142013, to be exact, when he showed his \u201cGazing Ball\u201d sculptures, which pair blue orbs with white plaster casts of ancient Greco-Roman artworks. The \u201cGazing Ball\u201d series flopped with critics<\/a>\u2014and seemingly with collectors<\/a>, too\u2014but it did at least feel like a new direction for Koons, who mostly worked in abstraction for the decade or so before them. The Gagosian show augurs no similar shift for Koons, who is stuck repeating himself, unashamedly cribbing ideas from past works.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tKoons\u2019s Kissing Couple (2016\u201325) feels salacious without pushing the envelope too much.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Christopher Garcia Valle\/ARTnews<\/p>\n

\n\tThe erotomania that animated his divisive \u201cMade in Heaven\u201d paintings of the \u201990s returns at Gagosian\u2014in a form that does not feature the artist in various states of arousal, thankfully\u2014with works such as Kissing Couple (2016\u201325). In that sculpture, a man and a woman bend toward each other, locking lips in a way that feels salacious without pushing the envelope too much. Notions of idol worship recurred throughout Koons\u2019s art of the 2010s, a period when he increasingly turned his gaze to the art of antiquity; those ideas are back in pieces such as Three Graces (2016\u201322), in which three nude women string a wreath of flowers around themselves. Plus, ever since the \u201980s, Koons has always been fascinated by how tiny objects suddenly gain big value when they\u2019re scaled up. At Gagosian, Koons turns his attention not toward shiny balloon dogs and piles of Play-Doh but porcelain figurines that could be held in one\u2019s hand.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis latest body of work is intentionally about stealing from the past. With the 10-foot-wide painting The Judgment of Paris (2018\u201325), Koons culls some muscular nudes and a dog from a 16th-century print by Marcantonio Raimondi, then recasts them in aluminum leaf and smears them with loops of pink paint. Utilizing a shlocky sunset as a background in place of the original print\u2019s ominous sky, Koons is essentially remaking Raimondi, who was himself remaking Raphael. But Koons is also copying himself, asking the same questions about authorship that he did back in the \u201980s, when he painted ads at a grand scale.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tInstallation view of \u201cJeff Koons: Porcelain Series,\u201d 2025, at Gagosian, New York.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Christopher Garcia Valle\/ARTnews<\/p>\n

\n\tWith nothing new left to say, Koons instead focuses on dressing up previously explored concepts in new clothes. In an interview<\/a> for Gagosian\u2019s magazine, he said that he and his studio took great pains to ensure that The Judgment of Paris will look the same 200 years from now as it does right now. Poor guy. He has no idea that no one will thinking about The Judgment of Paris\u2014or anything else in this forgettable show, on view through February 28\u2014by this time next year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jeff Koons\u2019s \u201cBanality\u201d sculptures of the late 1980s are anything but ordinary: few can easily forget the sight…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":302031,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88,11958,47950],"class_list":{"0":"post-302030","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-gagosian","14":"tag-jeff-koons"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302030\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/302031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}