Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons
Balloon Flower
1997
Special stainless steel, 289 x 335 x 274 cm
© Jeff Koons
The motifs for the series of large-format sculptures and paintings called "Celebration" seem, like "Balloon Flowers", to have been taken from children's books or fairy-tales, or even from a gift catalogue. They are familiar, at least, there is nothing that is completely strange. But no matter how spontaneous and amusing the recognition experience might be, whether the object comes from the world of things or the world of the imagination, it is not something we have seen before.
On the contrary, it confronts us as an image in the image and as a sculpture in the space. The Balloon Flower consists of seven elements: six large blossom- or balloon-like shapes of various sizes, and one bar that can be taken as a flower stem. They are all aglow in the radiance of a triumphant blue, so that they can see themselves and the world around them reflected. That is the truly appealing thing about the Balloon Flower: it attracts people to look at it, and then reflects them back at themselves.
Background
The Balloon Flower was always intended for a public place. The public has become part of Jeff Koons' work - as a medium. A new generation of artists emerged in about 1980. They proceeded, strategically and unhesitatingly, to celebrate mundaneness and mass media production as propagated two decades before by Pop Art.
This generation, which as well as Koons included artists like Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler and Haim Steinbach, went even further than their predecessors. They produced a cynical mixture of kitsch and aesthetics, seduction strategies and ambush tactics - an aggressive and uncompromising exploitation of the language of Pop and its marketing.
Jeff Koons amazed the art world at his first one-man show in the New York New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1980 by showing three self-contained work groups that seemed like the product range from a newly established trading chain: "Inflatables", "The Pre-New" and "The New". The first group consists of inflatable rubber flowers and toys, placed on mirror plinths that infinitely multiply the blown-up emptiness of the objects.
In "The Pre-New", Koons presents everyday objects mounted on plastic fluorescent tubes. And in "The New", he takes up Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades from the early years of the century by showing brand-new cleaning appliances in sterile illuminated showcases. "I think", says Koons, "that ordinariness is the very thing that can save us today. Ordinariness is one of the most important resources we have at our disposal. It is a great seducer, as it works on our feelings subliminally. That is the degrading thing - because we are not threatened by it."
Biographical details
1955 Born in York (Pennsylvania). ·
Lives in New York - "School of the Art Institute of Chicago"
1986 Exhibition in the Sonnabend Gallery in New York. ·
1990 A sculpture from the "Made in Heaven" series is shown at the Biennale in Venice. ·
1992 "Puppy", a 12 metre high sculpture, is shown outside the Baroque palace in Aroldsen.External link: More about Jeff Koons
