Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, Whitney Museum of Art, Behind the Mirror Beauty, Amanda Teague

Jeff Koons is widely regarded as one of the most important, influential, popular, and controversial artists of the postwar era. This exhibition is the artist’s first major museum presentation in New York, and the first to fill nearly the entirety of the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer building with a single artist’s work. It is also the final exhibition to take place there before the Museum opens its new building in the Meatpacking District in 2015.

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, Whitney Museum of Art, Behind the Mirror Beauty, Amanda Teague

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“Koons moved to New York in 1977 after completing his studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While there he had been making paintings inspired by his dreams and the work of his hero Salvador Dalí. In New York, he took a job selling memberships at the Museum of Modern Art, where he encountered recent Conceptual Art and the readymades of Marcel Duchamp. For Koons, these unaltered industrial products engaged the everyday world more directly than the images he had painted from his fantasies. His first experiments with the readymade involved the cheap inflatables he found scouring novelty shops in downtown Manhattan. He used these toys to turn his East Village apartment into a riotous installation and to make sculptures that explore the fetishes and other irrational forces driving consumer culture.”

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, Whitney Museum of Art, Behind the Mirror Beauty, Amanda Teague

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, Whitney Museum of Art, Behind the Mirror Beauty, Amanda Teague

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, Whitney Museum of Art, Behind the Mirror Beauty, Amanda Teague

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, Whitney Museum of Art, Behind the Mirror Beauty, Amanda Teague

“While Koons’s previous art-historical references spanned decades or centuries, in Antiquity he looks across millennia to Paleolithic and classical precedents that evoke the themes of love, beauty, and desire.”

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, Whitney Museum of Art, Behind the Mirror Beauty, Amanda Teague

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, Whitney Museum of Art, Behind the Mirror Beauty, Amanda Teague

“The layered compositions of Koons’s canvases—with a grinning monkey, an erotic scene from a Japanese print, and a linear depiction of a horse-drawn carriage confronting a train—suggest sexual union, the clash of opposing worlds, permanence and evanescence, and a sense of power and confidence made all the more compelling by the threat of obsolescence and deflation.”

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, Whitney Museum of Art, Behind the Mirror Beauty, Amanda Teague

 

If you would like to see more pics from the exhibition make sure and check out my instagram @behindthemirrorbeauty.

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, Whitney Museum of Art, Behind the Mirror Beauty, Amanda Teague

 

***beauty always comes from within, photos taken by Amanda Teague, xoxo behind the mirror***
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