5/5 Girish S. 1 year ago on Google
Jeff
Koons
Puppy
Jeff
Koons
rose
to
prominence
in
the
mid-1980s
as
part
of
a
generation
of
artists
who
explored
the
meaning
of
art
in
a
media-saturated
era
and
the
attendant
crisis
of
representation.
With
his
stated
artistic
intention
to
“communicate
with
the
masses,”
Koons
draws
from
the
visual
language
of
advertising,
marketing,
and
the
entertainment
industry.
Testing
the
limits
between
popular
and
elite
culture,
his
sculptural
menagerie
includes
Plexiglas-encased
Hoover
vacuum
cleaners,
basketballs
suspended
in
glass
aquariums,
photographs
of
himself
coupled
with
his
then-wife
Ilona
Staller,
also
known
as
La
Cicciolina
(former
adult-film
star
and
member
of
Italian
parliament),
and
porcelain
homages
to
Michael
Jackson
and
the
Pink
Panther.
In
extending
the
lineage
of
Dada
and
Marcel
Duchamp,
and
integrating
references
to
Minimalism
and
Pop,
Koons
stages
art
as
a
commodity
that
cannot
be
placed
within
the
hierarchy
of
conventional
aesthetics.
Koons’s
series
Easyfun-Ethereal
foregrounds
happy-face
deli
sandwiches,
spiraling
roller-coaster
rides,
and
windswept
hair
all
set
against
sublime
landscapes.
The
artist
combines
familiar
yet
unrelated
images
to
create
collagelike
paintings
rendered
with
photorealist
perfection.
These
works
recall
the
advertising
iconography
and
billboard-style
painting
technique
present
in
James
Rosenquist‘s
canvases.
Koons’s
new
brand
of
Pop
painting
cleverly
engages
other
art-historical
references,
in
particular
Surrealism
and
Abstract
Expressionism.
Sandwiches,
for
example,
is
a
disjunctive,
free-floating
fantasy.
The
collage
of
animated
deli-meats,
the
turkey
made
of
ice
cream,
and
the
cartoon
eye
and
moustache
recall
the
free-associative
visual
games
of
Salvador
Dalí,
Max
Ernst,
and
René
Magritte,
while
the
background
streams
and
splashes
of
milk
echo
the
abstractions
of
Jackson
Pollock.
Koons’s
fusion
of
Pop
representations
with
Surrealist
and
abstract
overtones
creates
a
hybrid
of
fun
and
fantasy,
yielding
a
body
of
work
that
depicts
gravity-defying
forms
of
dreamlike
pleasure.
In
Puppy,
Koons
engages
both
past
and
present,
employing
sophisticated
computer
modeling
while
referencing
the
18th-century
formal
garden.
A
behemoth
West
Highland
terrier
carpeted
in
bedding
plants,
Puppy
combines
the
most
saccharine
of
iconography—flowers
and
puppies—in
a
monument
to
the
sentimental.
Its
size—seemingly
out-of-control
(it
is
both
literally
and
figuratively
still
growing)
but
carefully
constructed
and
tightly
contained—can
be
read
as
an
analogue
of
contemporary
culture.
Dignified
and
stalwart,
this
work
fills
us
with
awe,
and
even
joy,
while
standing
guard
at
the
Guggenheim
Museum
Bilbao.
In
keeping
with
themes
in
his
past
work,
Koons
has,
by
combining
elite
references
(topiary
and
dog
breeding)
with
those
of
the
masses
(Chia
Pets
and
Hallmark
greeting
cards),
designed
this
public
sculpture
to
relentlessly
entice,
to
create
optimism,
and
to
instill,
in
his
own
words,
“confidence
and
security.
