Skin Fruit presents work from the Dakis Joannou Collection, curated by artist Jeff Koons. Including over 100 works by 50 international artists, this exhibition at The New Museum in New York is the first presentation of the Dakis Joannou Collection in the United States.
Focusing on the body in contemporary art, the exhibition spotlights the age-old preoccupation with the human form as a vessel of and vehicle for experience. Koons’ title, Skin Fruit, alludes to notions of genesis, evolution, original sin, and sexuality. Skin and fruit evoke the essential tensions between interior and exterior, between what we see and what we consume.
The Dakis Joannou Collection consists of more than 1,500 works by 400 contemporary artists, from the most eminent to those just emerging. For Skin Fruit, Koons has selected sculptures, works on paper, paintings, installations, and videos by a group of artists including David Altmejd, Janine Antoni, Matthew Barney, Nathalie Djurberg, Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Terence Koh, Mark Manders, Paul McCarthy, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Kiki Smith, Christiana Soulou, Jannis Varelas, Kara Walker, and Andro Wekua, among others. The show also premieres new works such as Charles Ray’s re-envisioned Revolution Counter-Revolution (1990/2010); a new public installation of Jenny Holzer’s Selections from the Survival Series (1984); and Kinderama, a special 3-D book project by Italian artist Robert Cuoghi.
The installation for Skin Fruit has been conceived by Koons as a kind of panorama, with frequent shifts in scale and unconventional juxtapositions. Role-playing games and dramas occur: a performer stages a religious ritual; white chocolate monuments tower above the visitor’s head; voracious creatures eat themselves and each other while bodies are buried or frozen; icons and deities are adored or dethroned.
For more information please visit the New Museum’s Digital Archive
