Jeff Koons

Gagosian is pleased to announce Porcelain Series, an exhibition of new and recent sculptures and paintings by Jeff Koons opening on November 13 at the 541 West 24th Street gallery in New York. This is the first dedicated exhibition of the artist’s Porcelain series.

Using and exploring conceptual paradigms from the everyday to the ancient and the sublime, Koons produces luxurious icons and elaborate tableaux that, beneath their alluring decorative exteriors, engage the viewer in a metaphysical dialogue with the history of visual culture. His large-scale Porcelain sculptures are made of mirror-polished stainless steel that is coated in layers of transparent color. Modeled on eighteenth- to early twentieth-century porcelain figurines, the series features characters from classical mythology such as Diana and Venus; animals, including a stag paired with a dog; and lovers in a timeless embrace.

In these sculptures, Koons makes use of high-end contemporary production techniques to explore established notions of beauty; each gleaming artifact is the result of an extensive and painstaking process of digital capture and refinement, mechanical engineering, milling, laser plotting, painting, and polishing. The completed works manifest the artist’s appreciation for the way in which mirror-polished stainless steel combines physical resilience with heightened reflectiveness. The objects’ surfaces fuse their sensorial allure with symbolic potential. The finish affirms the viewer, making them a participant in the artwork and highlighting the works’ stylistic and conceptual interplay of past, present, and future.