Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to announce an exhibition by Jeff Koons featuring five recent large scale paintings.
„Wet-into-wet painting feels very 60s. That type of fluidness can’t be trusted so much today because of television and other media. There’s a sense of pixelation that we’ve come to trust more, and without it an image becomes fantasy.“ – Jeff Koons
Koons' paintings convey a bursting energy and declarative precision. He uses film stills, photographs and other print-related images; collages and manipulates them together digitally, before achieving the final composition by inserting abstract and figurative elements. The image is accurately and elaborately painted onto the canvas while Koons takes crucial care of every detail.
The titles, together with the roughly pixelated background and abstract linear motifs of the exhibited paintings are part of the Koonsian erotic cosmos. References to art history can always be met in Koons’ work: from baroque painting to Marcel Duchamp or as in this body of work, Gustave Courbet’s Origin of the World.
From the very beginning Koons’ work has questioned the traditional concept of art. Everyday objects such as vacuum cleaners, plastic flowers and animals, comic figures and children’s toys serve as inspiration for his work, which expose the value of society, its hierarchies and vulnerability. The viewer is challenged by Koons’ approach, which is both to aestheticize art and to strive for objectivity.
Parallel to our exhibition, the Neue Nationalgalerie will show sculptures by Jeff Koons from the Celebration series from October 31, 2008 – February 2, 2009.
Jeff Koons was born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania. After studying in Baltimore and Chicago, he moved to New York, where he still lives and works. Galerie Max Hetzler has been showing Jeff Koons’ work since 1986. This is his fourth exhibition at the gallery. Museum exhibitions include (since 2000): Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2008/09); Château de Versailles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (all 2008); Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2006); Helsinki City Art Museum, Helsinki (2005); Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo (2004); Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2002); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2002); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2001); Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2000) and The Royal Academy of Arts, London (2000).
Galerie Max Hetzler Temporary is showing paintings by Albert Oehlen at OsramHöfe, Oudenarder Str. 16-20 in Berlin-Wedding from November 1 – December 20, 2008.
