JEFF KOONS. CELEBRATION

JEFF KOONS (1955-)

"They're archetypes. And archetypes are bigger than any one individual." Jeff Koons on his sculpture series Celebration

Jeff Koons is one of the most successful contemporary artists on the international scene. An essential part of his work is staging himself in and through images. Koons’s approach is just as flashy, loud, and colorful as it is playful and kitschy, but at the same time, he clearly positions himself within art-historical traditions: he makes reference, for instance, to two of the most prominent artists of the twentieth century—Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol—as well as to the stylistic elements and visual theories of the Baroque and the Rococo.

This monograph, with its large-format color illustrations, documents Koons’s spectacular installation in the Upper Hall of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Koons presents the highly polished, oversized sculptures of his famous Celebration series, which he has been working on since the early nineties.

Edited by Anette Hüsch, texts by Anette Hüsch, poem by Rainald Goetz, Peter-Klaus Schuster

Exhibition: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie, October 31, 2008–February 8, 2009.