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[Koons’s] work is packed with an art-historical consciousness, and critics and historians have linked it to Surrealism, Hyperrealism, Pop, Minimalism—you name it, it’s all in there—but the results are never didactic or academic. They’re as accessible as products in a supermarket.
—Ingrid Sischy, Vanity Fair, March 2001
Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of eight new paintings by Jeff Koons. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles since 1987.
These new works for Gagosian are part of Koons’s ongoing Easyfun series, which was first shown in November 1999 in New York and includes a recent commission for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, entitled Easyfun-Ethereal. The collage-like paintings are initially conceptualized through computer-scanned images that Koons pieces together, melding often unrelated objects; then, with photo-realistic precision, they are painted on to large canvases, bringing twenty-first-century technology to ancient technique.
Beneath their seemingly innocent and ecstatic cartoon surfaces, the paintings are psychologically charged with aspects of need, desire, and sexuality. This adult’s view of pleasure distinguishes the new paintings from his 1994 Celebration series, which viewed life through the eyes of a child. Even though both series employ many of the same techniques of execution, gone are the hard-edged surfaces of the Celebration paintings—everything in the new works has become wet-into-wet painting.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.