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Jeff Koons

Easyfun-Ethereal

March 10–April 21, 2018
555 West 24th Street, New York

Installation view Artwork © Jeff Koons. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging

Installation view

Artwork © Jeff Koons. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging

Installation view Artwork © Jeff Koons. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging

Installation view

Artwork © Jeff Koons. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging

Installation view Artwork © Jeff Koons. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging

Installation view

Artwork © Jeff Koons. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging

Works Exhibited

Jeff Koons, Lips, 2000 (detail) Oil on canvas, 120 × 168 inches (304.8 × 426.7 cm)© Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons, Lips, 2000 (detail)

Oil on canvas, 120 × 168 inches (304.8 × 426.7 cm)
© Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons, Bluepoles, 2000 Oil on canvas, 120 × 168 inches (304.8 × 426.7 cm)© Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons, Bluepoles, 2000

Oil on canvas, 120 × 168 inches (304.8 × 426.7 cm)
© Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons, Woman Reclining, 2010–14 Granite and live flowering plants, 84 × 88 ½ × 46 ¼ inches (213.4 × 224.8 × 117.5 cm), edition of 3 + 1 AP© Jeff Koons. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging

Jeff Koons, Woman Reclining, 2010–14

Granite and live flowering plants, 84 × 88 ½ × 46 ¼ inches (213.4 × 224.8 × 117.5 cm), edition of 3 + 1 AP
© Jeff Koons. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging

About

My Easyfun-Ethereal paintings are very layered. My interest has always been to create art that can change with any culture or society viewing it. When I look at the paintings and realize all the historical references, it’s as if, for a moment, all ego is lost to meaning.
—Jeff Koons

Gagosian is pleased to present Easyfun-Ethereal, seven large-scale paintings by Jeff Koons, which were first presented together at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin in 2000. Three of the paintings are on generous loan from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Also on view will be Woman Reclining (2010–14), a granite sculpture from the Antiquity series.

Following the enthusiastic public response to Balloon Flower (Blue), the large mirror-polished stainless-steel sculpture installed in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin in 1999, the Deutsche Guggenheim commissioned the first seven of the Easyfun-Ethereal paintings: mural-sized tableaux that combine cutout photographs of packaged foods, fragments of faces, limbs, and hair, amusement park scenes, and paradisiacal landscapes into images of convulsive beauty.

The Easyfun-Ethereal series, which eventually expanded to twenty-four paintings, allowed Koons to work more spontaneously, in contrast to the detailed production demands of the Celebration sculptures. Working from computer-scanned reproductions taken from various printed media, as well as from his own photographs, he considers the use of gesture, expression, and eroticism in artistic precedents and American advertising. Multilayered yet possessing a classical order, the resulting paintings marry the immediacy of collage with Romantic grandeur.

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Jeff Koons: Easyfun-Ethereal

Jeff Koons: Easyfun-Ethereal

Learn more about Jeff Koons’s Easyfun-Ethereal series in this video featuring Rebecca Sternthal, one of the organizers behind the most recent exhibition of these works in New York.

Josh Kline, Skittles, 2014, commercial fridge, lightbox, and blended liquids in bottles, 86 ½ × 127 ½ × 41 inches (219.7 × 323.9 × 104.1 cm) © Josh Kline. Photo:  © Timothy Schenck

Laws of Motion

Catalyzed by Laws of Motion—a group exhibition pairing artworks from the 1980s on by Jeff Koons, Cady Noland, Rosemarie Trockel, and Jeff Wall with contemporary sculptures by Josh Kline and Anicka Yi—Wyatt Allgeier discusses the convergences and divergences in these artists’ practices with an eye to the economic worlds from which they spring.

The cover of the Fall 2019 Gagosian Quarterly magazine. Artwork by Nathaniel Mary Quinn

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2019

The Fall 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Sinking (2019) by Nathaniel Mary Quinn on its cover.

Glenstone Museum.

Intimate Grandeur: Glenstone Museum

Paul Goldberger tracks the evolution of Mitchell and Emily Rales’s Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland. Set amid 230 acres of pristine landscape and housing a world-class collection of modern and contemporary art, this graceful complex of pavilions, designed by architects Thomas Phifer and Partners, opened to the public in the fall of 2018.

Still from video Visions of the Self: Jenny Saville on Rembrandt

Visions of the Self: Jenny Saville on Rembrandt

Jenny Saville reveals the process behind her new self-portrait, painted in response to Rembrandt’s masterpiece Self-Portrait with Two Circles.

RxART

The Bigger Picture
RxART

Derek Blasberg speaks with Diane Brown, president and founder of RxART, and with contributing artists Dan Colen, Urs Fischer, and Jeff Koons about the transformative power of visual art.

News

Jeff Koons, Cherubs, 1991 © Jeff Koons. Photo: Rob McKeever

Art Fair

TEFAF Online New York 2020
Jeff Koons

November 1–4, 2020

Gagosian is pleased to participate in TEFAF Online New York 2020 with a special presentation of Cherubs (1991) by Jeff Koons.

A wall sculpture in polychromed wood, Cherubs forms a key part of Koons’s renowned Made in Heaven series (1989–91) and merges his investigation of kitsch aesthetics and commodity culture with a veneration of Baroque craftsmanship—it was carved by artisans from the Bavarian village of Oberammergau. Making reference to the Rococo visions of Jean-Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher, and evoking the cavorting figures of Cupid or Eros, Cherubs combines the religious and the sensual, bringing divergent conceptions of taste and value into confrontation with one another.

Jeff Koons, Cherubs, 1991 © Jeff Koons. Photo: Rob McKeever