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Acquisitions

ARTIST ROOMS: The d'Offay Donation

ARTIST ROOMS: The d'Offay Donation

Jeff Koons (born 1955)

Two rooms comprising 17 works: New Hoover Convertibles, 1981–7; a basketball piece, Encased, 1983–93; Winter Bears, 1988; the billboard Made in Heaven, 1989; Mound of Flowers, 1991; Bourgeois Bust – Jeff and Ilona, 1991; a rare set of nine Easyfun mirrors, 1999; Caterpillar (with chains), 2002 and a portfolio of prints, Art Magazine Ads, 1988–9.

Through his use first of everyday items such as vacuum cleaners and basketballs and later by creating oversized kitsch objects, Jeff Koons reflects upon the power of consumer industries and the aesthetics and culture of taste. Although Koons makes use of the kind of references reminiscent of Pop Art his means of production, first in the studio and then demanding total perfection from specialists in each chosen medium, far outstrips anything from that earlier period. His perfectionism is legendary. Drawing together a range of styles and spanning a broad chronology from early 1980s to the late 1990s, the works in The d’Offay Donation highlight some of the artist’s most important series. In New Hoover Convertibles Koons preserves a banal, household object as a new commodity in perpetuity making its function obsolete within a contained vitrine. The idea of protected perfection is at the heart of Encased, from the artist’s series of basketball works, in which Koons sought to achieve constant equilibrium by suspending the balls in liquid. Winter Bears was first shown in Koons’s landmark exhibition Banality. The carved wooden figures derive from popular figurines, blown up to mammoth proportions to create a sculpture that is at once familiar yet grotesque. Koons’s fascination with kitsch and Baroque styles is also found in Mound of Flowers and the Bourgeois Bust, a marble sculpture which depicts the artist and his wife, Ilona. This portrait bust is part of a larger body of work in which Koons and Ilona starred in their own erotic romance, documented through a series of sculpture and photographic works. The billboard Made in Heaven and the Art Magazine Ads use standard advertising methods and were made to publicise the project.

New Hoover Convertibles, Green, Red, Brown, New Shelton Wet/Dry 10 Gallon Displaced Doubledecker New Hoover Convertibles, Green, Red, Brown, New Shelton Wet/Dry 10 Gallon Displaced Doubledecker 1981-87
Vacuum cleaners, Plexiglas and fluorescent lights
2510 x 1370 x 710 mm
Photo courtesy Anthony d'Offay Ltd
© Jeff Koons

Winter Bears Winter Bears 1988
Polychromed wood
1219 x 1107 x 394 mm
Photo courtesy Anthony d'Offay Ltd
© Jeff Koons

Made in Heaven Made in Heaven 1989
Lithograph on paper on canvas
3180 x 6910 mm
Number 2 in an edition of 3
Photo courtesy Anthony d'Offay Ltd
© Jeff Koons

Bourgeois Bust - Jeff and Ilona Bourgeois Bust - Jeff and Ilona 1991
White marble
1130 x 711 x 533 mm
Artist's proof aside from the edition of 3
Photo courtesy Anthony d'Offay Ltd
© Jeff Koons

Artists

National Heritage Memorial Fund       The Art Fund       Department for Culture, Media and Sport      The Scottish Government

 

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