Jeff Koons: A Millennium Celebration is a retrospective exhibition of artist Jeff Koons, with works drawn from one of the most extensive collections of the artist’s work, the Dakis Joannou Collection. The exhibition presents a wide range of the artist’s oeuvre from some of his earliest works to his most recent paintings. It includes examples from all of the artist’s major series, including The New, Equilibrium, Luxury and Degradation, Statuary, Banality, Made in Heaven, and Celebration.
Widely acknowledged as one of the most influential artists of the past 20 years, Koons has also generated considerable controversy and debate surrounding his choice of subject matter and methods of presentation. Addressing some of today’s key issues such as class, race, money, sex, obscenity, beauty, power, and desire, he raises questions about contemporary life through the experience of mass culture. His work probes the status of the commodity in the context of late capitalism and examines contemporary society’s investment in novelty, presentation, and appearance. The artist often appropriates the imagery and tactics of television, the shopping mall, comics, and advertising. Elsewhere he references the world of childhood and adolescence or explores the boundaries of eroticism and sexuality. With his references to ready-made objects, Koons focuses on the strategies of seduction, desire, voyeurism, as well as the underlying fetishism of consumer culture. Although his work deploys the icons of mass production and popular culture, it also implies the world of high art. From his use of Baroque and Rococo excess to elaborations on the Duchampian ready-made and Warhol’s transformations of popular iconography, his works straddle the boundary and reflect the ambiguous relationship between art and mass culture, sophisticated aesthetics and kitsch.
