Neo pop art history
Jeff Koons (b)
Made in Heaven Series
Having become an art star, Koons turned next to film, and decided that the quickest way to become a film star was to make an 'adult' film. This led him to meet and marry the Italian actress La Cicciolina (Hungarian-born naturalized-Italian Ilona Staller), who subsequently appeared in much of his Made in Heaven work, including paintings, glass sculptures and colour photographs of herself and Koons in explicit poses.
(See also: fine art photography. See also: Is Photography Art? ) Hugely controversial, its admirers see the series as his greatest work, confronting issues of guilt/shame in a similar way to the Renaissance masterpiece Adam and Eve's Expulsion From the Garden of Eden (, Brancacci Chapel) by Masaccio.
In Koons and Staller married, and the following year had a son, Ludwig, but the marriage ended soon afterward. After agreeing to joint custody, Staller absconded to Italy with the child. Koons later destroyed much of his Made in Heaven work during the custody battle.
Celebration Series
This set of work, associated with Neo-Expressionism, began when Koons' son Ludwig was born in , and focused on the shapes and colours of the baby's first toys - the sort of art that a small child could relate to.
The idea was to make huge reproductions of easter eggs, valentine hearts, balloon animals and other joyful images in brightly coloured metal. Unfortunately, many works ended up taking longer and being far more costly to produce than planned.
Short biography sample As a child of the Japanese economic miracle, his work is a skillful combination of traditional Japanese religious art and characters from the television, video games, otakus and manga. Man's caution and fear of these creatures stems from their role as a vehicle in the spread of the bubonic plague, an epidemic which killed thousands of Europeans during the fourteenth century. Through color and content, Fritsch is able to transform these duplicated images into viable pieces of art. Through monotonous replication she is able to change the connotation that the object was originally meant to express.Luckily, in , Koons was commissioned to produce a piece of work for a German art exhibition in Bad Arolsen. Koons duly made one of his most popular works, Puppy, a forty-three feet high sculpture of a West Highland White Terrier puppy made out of flowers arranged on a skeletal steel structure. It was bought by the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Foundation in and installed outside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. An exact duplicate was made for the Connecticut estate of the multi-millionaire businessman Peter Brant.
The Celebration series also included several 9-feet tall highly polished steel hearts, painted in different colours. In , a magenta-coloured version (Hanging Heart) sold at Sotheby's for $23 million, a world auction record at the time for a living artist.
Other sculptures from the Celebration series were shown in public in , at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Koons' Celebration Series eventually appeared in several of the best art museums around the world, where it enhanced his reputation as a crowd-puller if not exactly the next Michelangelo.
Exhibitions
In , seventeen sculptures by Jeff Koons were exhibited at the Baroque Palace of Versailles, the chateau's first major show devoted to an American contemporary artist.
In the same year he had a retrospective at the Chicago Art Institute, and a major exhibition at Berlins's Neue Nationalgalerie. In , Koons had his first major solo exhibition in London, at the Serpentine Gallery.
Neopop biography sample template And precisely, dollars, it is the topic with Damien Hirst. His admirers, on the other hand, point to his popularity among the general public, his high regard among museums, and his bank balance, and say something like: it may not be art, but people like it. What is a work of art? It seems that by his personal consent to publish these works, he seeks to avoid creating sexual arousal, and instead liberates the viewer from self-consciousness and observes his art without guilt.The exhibition showcased his new Popeye Series, a set of metal sculptures of inflatable toys. They included dolphins, lobsters and others, cast in aluminum, together with realist paintings of Popeye smoking his pipe, with a red lobster hovering over his head. Meantime, following the donation of a number of Koons works by his former dealer Anthony d'Offay, the Tate Modern has opened a special room dedicated to the artist.
Jeff Koons - Postmodernist Artist or Showman?
Differences of opinion about Koons' worth as an artist essentially revolve around differences in the meaning of art.
Traditional art theory places great importance on the craftsmanship disclosed by an objective work of art - like a beautiful painting or a wonderfully realistic sculpture.
Neopop biography sample pdf Warhol died in , but he had long before inspired a while generation of new artists. In addition, he began using contractors such as German wood-carvers, and hired an image consultant. Differences of opinion about Koons' worth as an artist essentially revolve around differences in the meaning of art. Carcasses of sheep, cows, sharks, doves and even a carpet of dead fliesFurthernore, purists consider that only certain subjects are worthy of artistic representation. Using these criteria, critics point to the lack of craftsmanship in Koons' works, and the fact that a lot of the work was performed by assistants. What's more, his subjects are uniformly low-brow - too low-brow to be "artistic".
His admirers, on the other hand, point to his popularity among the general public, his high regard among museums, and his bank balance, and say something like: it may not be art, but people like it. The debate continues.
Works by Jeff Koons and other postmodernists like Damien Hirst (b) and Tracey Emin (b) can be seen in many of the best art museums throughout the world.