Jeff Koons

Frankfurt

The Schirn Kunsthalle and the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung currently present the work of the U.S. American artist Jeff Koons, who has played a pioneering role in the contemporary art world since the 1980s. The two concurrent shows will deliberately separate the sculptural and painterly aspects of his oeuvre and present each in a context of its own. Encompassing some forty paintings, the presentation entitled Jeff Koons. The Painter at the Schirn will focus primarily on the artist’s structural development as a painter. In the show Jeff Koons. The Sculptor at the Liebieghaus, on the other hand, altogether around 50 world-famous as well as entirely new sculptures by Jeff Koons will enter into dialogues with the historical building and a sculpture collection spanning five millennia. Jeff Koons’s ‚Antiquity‘, a new series in which he explores antique art and its central motif—Eros—will debut in Frankfurt on this occasion.

In his paintings and sculptures, Jeff Koons employs elements from the consumer world and „high culture“ alike, quotes artistic epochs as readily as he does objects from everyday life and advertising, and thus draws our attention again and again to such categories as beauty and desirability. Within this context, he has become an unequalled master of the interplay between the sublime and the banal. Although his works quote familiar motifs from the consumer context, it is not for the sake of kitsch and irony. Contrary to the long tradition of subjectivity in art, however, Koons constantly emphasizes artistic objectivity, working in the tradition of the „ready-made.“ Both his sculptures and his paintings have a particularly evocative and striking effect on the viewer through their exquisite craftsmanship and the lure of their surfaces.

June 20th – September 23rd, 2012

Schirn
Jeff Koons. The Painter
Römerberg
60311 Frankfurt
Germany

Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung
Jeff Koons. The Sculptor
Schaumainkai 71
60596 Frankfurt
Germany

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