Jeff Koons
The Painter & the Sculptor
June 20–September 23, 2012
Jeff Koons. The Painter
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
Römerberg, D-60311 Frankfurt
welcome [at] schirn.de
T +49 69 29 98 82-0
F +49 69 29 98 82-240
Jeff Koons. The Sculptor
Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung
Schaumainkai 71, D-60596 Frankfurt
info [at] liebieghaus.de
T +49 69 65 00 49-0
F +49 69 65 00 49-150
Hours, Schirn and Liebieghaus:
Tue, Fri–Sun 10–7pm, Wed and Thur 10–10pm
www.schirn.de
www.liebieghaus.de
This summer, the Schirn Kunsthalle and the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung will be devoting themselves to the work of the U.S. American artist Jeff Koons (born in 1955), who has played a pioneering role in the contemporary art world since the 1980s. The two concurrent shows will deliberately separate the sculptural and painterly aspects of his oeuvre and present each in a context of its own. Encompassing some forty paintings, the presentation entitled Jeff Koons. The Painter at the Schirn will focus primarily on the artist’s structural development as a painter. In the show Jeff Koons. The Sculptor at the Liebieghaus, on the other hand, altogether around 50 world-famous as well as entirely new sculptures by Jeff Koons will enter into dialogues with the historical building and a sculpture collection spanning five millennia. Jeff Koons’s Antiquity, a new series in which he explores antique art and its central motif—Eros—will debut in Frankfurt on this occasion.
In his paintings and sculptures, Jeff Koons employs elements from the consumer world and “high culture” alike, quotes artistic epochs as readily as he does objects from everyday life and advertising, and thus draws our attention again and again to such categories as beauty and desirability. Within this context, he has become an unequalled master of the interplay between the sublime and the banal. Although his works quote familiar motifs from the consumer context, it is not for the sake of kitsch and irony. Contrary to the long tradition of subjectivity in art, however, Koons constantly emphasizes artistic objectivity, working in the tradition of the “ready-made.” Both his sculptures and his paintings have a particularly evocative and striking effect on the viewer through their exquisite craftsmanship and the lure of their surfaces.
The exhibition Jeff Koons. The Painter at the Schirn—to be spread out almost over the gallery’s entire exhibition space—will be the first ever to offer a comprehensive overview of the artist’s painterly work, from the early machine paintings of the Luxury & Degradation series and the Made in Heaven works to the large-scale hand-painted work of the Celebration, Easyfun, Easyfun-Ethereal, Popeye, Hulk Elvis, and the new Antiquity series. The quotations from everyday life and various art-historical as well as general-historical epochs which Koons interweaves in his paintings are free-floating compositional elements assigned a modulatory or repetitive function.
In the exhibition Jeff Koons. The Sculptor at the Liebieghaus, the artist’s sculptures will be integrated into the museum’s own collection, which mirrors the history of sculpture from antiquity to Neoclassicism. In close cooperation with the artist, one of his numerous and often iconic sculptural works will be introduced to each of the Liebieghaus’s various sections, causing a range of widely different dialogues to ensue. The entire Liebieghaus ensemble—the richly detailed historicist villa, the gallery buildings, and the large, fairy-tale-castle-like garden—will together accommodate the sculptures by Jeff Koons like a single big stage.
The exhibition Jeff Koons. The Painter & The Sculptor is sponsored by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Gas-Union GmbH, Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain, and City of Frankfurt am Main.
Director: Max Hollein.
Curators: Matthias Ulrich (Schirn Kunsthalle), Prof. Dr. Vinzenz Brinkmann (Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung), Dr. Joachim Pissarro (Hunter College, New York).
Project management: Dr. Heike Höcherl.
Press contact
Dorothea Apovnik (head Press/Public Relations), Markus Farr (press spokesman),
Carolyn Meyding (press officer).
T +49-69 29 98 82-148 / F +49-69 29 98 82-240 / presse@schirn.de / www.schirn.de (texts, images, and films for download under PRESS).
*Image above:
Jeff Koons, Antiquity 3, 2011. From the Antiquity series. Oil on canvas, 259.1 x 350.5 cm. © Jeff Koons.
