JEFF KOONS

Using and exploring conceptual paradigms from the everyday to the ancient and the sublime, Koons produces luxurious icons and elaborate tableaux that, beneath their alluring decorative exteriors, engage the viewer in a metaphysical dialogue with the history of visual culture. His large-scale Porcelain sculptures are made of mirror-polished stainless steel that is coated in layers of transparent color. Modeled on eighteenth- to early twentieth-century porcelain figurines, the series features characters from classical mythology such as Diana and Venus; animals, including a stag paired with a dog; and lovers in a timeless embrace.

In these sculptures, Koons makes use of high-end contemporary production techniques to explore established notions of beauty; each gleaming artifact is the result of an extensive and painstaking process of digital capture and refinement, mechanical engineering, milling, laser plotting, painting, and polishing. The completed works manifest the artist’s appreciation for the way in which mirrorpolished stainless steel combines physical resilience with heightened reflectiveness. The objects’ surfaces fuse their sensorial allure with symbolic potential. The finish affirms the viewer, making them a participant in the artwork and highlighting the works’ stylistic and conceptual interplay of past, present, and future.

In Koons’s Porcelain oil paintings, the first layer is a naturalistically rendered element of landscape such as an ocean wave, clouds, or a forest. On top of this, Koons himself paints large, active, gestural brushstrokes. Then, a layer of aluminum leafing is applied, using a sizing technique, producing images of prints drawn from the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation. Finally, Koons paints additional dynamic gestures on top, adding a material richness that echoes the work’s sensual and conceptual depth.

Incorporating engravings such as Agostino Carracci’s Satyr Whipping a Nymph (c. 1590–95) and Nymph, Putto, and a Small Satyr (c. 1590–95), Marcantonio Raimondi’s The Judgment of Paris (c. 1513– 15, after Raphael), and Johann Sadeler’s Neptune and Caenis (1580), Koons examines the continuity of images as they move through time by rooting his compositions in art historical precedent, reviving and intensifying previously reinterpreted scenes from myth and legend.

Koons states, “The Porcelain series is in dialogue with art from ancient times through history to this moment; the belief in humanity and civilization through our possibility to transcend is embedded within.”