Jeff Koons

The artist Jeff Koons represents a remarkable fusion of small-town ingenuousness, urban ambition and perfection. His work can also be read as autobiographical, since it often obliquely draws on his childhood spent in provincial York, Pennsylvania. Koons draws endlessly on the fleeting pleasures of the quotidian and its saccharine forms, legitimating the seemingly unimportant aesthetic moments of daily life. His sculptures and paintings are precise documents of banality.

It's through the power of artistic and technological perfection that Koons transformed such visual trivia into glittering arrogance. This new approach was born in New York: After studying art in Baltimore and Chicago, the young Koons headed to New York to prove himself. He realized immediately that his art would have to be technologically ambitious, and became an investor in order to obtain the financial means to execute materially costly artworks. The result of this capital investment was first seen in his 1985 "Equilibrium" exhibition, for which he suspended basketballs in water-filled glass tanks and made bronze casts of an Aqualung and a lifeboat. In his close collaboration with professional fabricators he paradoxically returned to the craft-based tradition of the pre-industrial era.

As his contribution to "Empire State," Koons shows three works from his most recent "Antiquity" series. The paintings in this series depict ancient Greek statues connected with Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and Dionysus, the god of inebriation, combined with images and citations from Koons' own oeuvre. Antiquity 1 shows the famous marble sculpture group from Delos, the island of rich merchants, in which the goat-footed god Pan teases Aphrodite and the goddess playfully brandishes her sandal. Originally Greek sculptures in marble were painted in garish colors, creating a hyperrealistic effect.
Koons likewise conceives his statues in vivid polychrome. The surfaces of his works are perfect, and he ascribes maximum importance to each square millimeter. In fact, he is mysteriously in tune with the artists of ancient Greece, who strove with all their might to achieve mimesis, the ultimate illusion. It is this promise of perfection, hidden in modernism but afoot in New York, that Koons explores and exploits.

Vinzenz Brinkmann