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16 March 2011

Jeff Koons show comes to Edinburgh

One of the most highly acclaimed and internationally successful artists working today is the focus of a new display at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art this spring. ARTIST ROOMS: Jeff Koons brings together a selection of 18 major works charting the American artist’s career from the early 1980s until 2003.

Among the highlights of the exhibition which is on show from 19 March – 3 July, are key examples from some of the artist’s most important and iconic series of works, including The New (which explores the seductive allure of pristine consumer goods), and Made in Heaven (a series of provocative images and sculptures featuring Koons and his wife, the Italian politician and adult film-star Ilona Staller). The display also features two works from the landmark series Banality, for which Koons is perhaps most renowned. These will include Bear and Policeman (1988), which will be on loan from the collection of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany.

Jeff Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania in 1955, and moved to New York in the mid-1970s, having studied art and design in Baltimore and Chicago. Though he is now almost unrivalled in terms of commercial success, the artist famously supported himself during his early career by working as a commodities broker, an experience which has informed the way his work engages with the commercialism and materialism of our society.

Using commonplace, ready-made objects, Koons consciously referred to the work of the pioneer conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), calling into question the established values of the art world, and exploring ideas of culture and taste. For the Banality series, Koons developed this approach, commissioning specialist craftsmen to reproduce inexpensive toys, dolls and figurines in polychromed wood and porcelain. Like Bear and Policeman, Winter Bears (1988) was carved by highly skilled Bavarian woodcarvers, using centuries-old techniques to recreate a miniature child’s ornament on a disconcertingly large scale.

The most recent work in the display, Caterpillar Chains (2003), revives the artist’s interest in inflatable toys (a prominent feature in some of his earlier work). The caterpillar in question is an aluminium cast of a child’s pool toy, painstakingly painted in bright colours so that it is barely distinguishable from the plastic original. The work comes from the Popeye series, in which Koons combined cast inflatables, somewhat incongruously, with readymade objects: here the caterpillar is suspended, or perhaps constrained by vibrant red chains.
 

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