Pop master Jeff Koons offers up a glittery vision of a world distilled from media images and exploded onto canvas. The collage-like paintings in Koons's Easyfun-Ethereal series combine such bizarrely varied items as cold-cut sandwiches with smiley faces, women's manicured feet in fancy shoes, gooey pastries, and landscaped backdrops. Food and female sexual symbols figure prominently in this series of paintings, flying pieces of canned corn layered with floating red mouths and shiny eyelids. And while the erotic nature of food has a long history, e.g. tales of aphrodisiacs like oysters, there is something unnerving about the sexualization of Cheerios and melted American cheese. The book includes an essay by art critic Robert Rosenblum expounding on the references embedded in Koons's work. Rosenblum discusses pop imagery taken from childhood objects and art historical influences ranging from baroque and rococo to pop, abstract expressionism, and surrealism. An interview with Koons himself reveals some of his more personal relationships with his process and work. For Jeff Koons fans this is a must-have. --J.P. Cohen
Jeff Koons: Easyfun-Ethereal FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Since the late 1970s Jeff Koons has created an exceptional body of work that reflects deeply upon the complex concerns of Western culture. Entitled Easyfun-Ethereal, Koon's new series of paintings employs imagery drawn from glossy magazines, brochures, and advertisements, as well as personal photographs. For each of his works, Koons has cut and pasted elements from these different sources and collaged them together in various, sometimes unrelated, ways using the advanced technology of the computer. These electronic images are then transformed into traditional oil paintings rendered with photo-realist precision. Koons's paintings recall the advertising iconography of the 1960s Pop artists. Yet by comparison, Koons's work is infused with elements of the Baroque and Rococo, exuding an excess sensuality and effervescent spirit. With his stated artistic intention to "communicate with the masses," Koons creates imagery that simultaneously celebrates adult sexual desire and allure, as well as the imaginative universe of childhood pleasures." This catalogue was published on the occasion of an exhibition featuring seven new works by the artist commissioned for Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin. Illustrated with full-color reproductions of Jeff Koon's work, this elegant volume includes an interview with the artist by David Sylvester, which offers readers the artist's personal insight into his entire career, as well as an essay by Robert Rosenblum, which provides in-depth analysis of the artist's technique and imagery used in his new paintings.
Art & Photography
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