Exceptional Works: Jeff Koons

“Reflections tell the viewer that nothing is ever happening without them. Art happens inside them.”

—Jeff Koons

Balloon Venus Lespugue (Red) extends Koons’s long exploration of stainless steel’s all-encompassing, highly reflective surface, which absorbs the viewer and casts their surroundings in an eerie red glow. The sculpture’s mirror-like finish makes the viewer part of the artwork: it is not only an object of perception but also one that reflects us back to ourselves. “One of the most used words in philosophy is to ‘reflect.’ To reflect is an inward process, but also an outward process,” says Koons. “The use of reflective surfaces was to connect the work to philosophy and the experience of becoming. And that we not only have our internal life, but we also have the external world—this interaction is what gives us a future.”

Koons’s 1986 Rabbit represents an important breakthrough in his practice as the first inflatable form to be cast in metal.

Jeff Koons, Aqualung, 1985

Koons’s broader engagement with inflatable forms dates to the late 1970s. For his first mature body of work, Inflatables, he placed small blow-up flowers in mirrored tableaux. In 1986, Koons created his now-canonical Rabbit, his first inflatable form to be rendered in highly reflective stainless steel.

The female Venus form started appearing in Koons’s work in the late 1970s, and he sees Snorkel Vest and Aqualung (both 1985) as feminine and masculine representations of the Venus of Willendorf. “Looking at these sculptures of inflatable life-saving devices, you become aware of their anthropomorphic aspects,” the artist says. “Certain works of mine have a dialogue with time and space through the references of human history and my Venus sculptures are an example of those.”

Left and Right: Vénus de Lespugue. Mammoth ivory. Upper Paleolithic, c. 23000 BC. Musée de l'Homme, Paris Photo © JC Domenech / MNHN, Paris.

The figure of Venus, goddess of love and fertility, has long influenced Koons’s work, appearing directly since the late 1970s. Part of his Antiquity series, which he began in 2008, the artist’s interpretation of the Venus of Lespugue—a small statuette from the Paleolithic era—engages a variety of art historical reference points, from Botticelli and Titian to Duchamp and Brancusi, and, more generally, notions of beauty and form throughout time. Through an intensive, yearslong process, Koons has transposed the fetishized original, renowned for its exaggerated curves, into a towering balloon sculpture of Giacometti-esque proportions.

Venus of Willendorf. Limestone. Stone Age, Aurignacien, 28000–25000 BC. Photo © Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY

Constantin Brancusi, Mademoiselle Pogany II, 1920. Albright-Knox Art Gallery / Art Resource, NY. © ARS, NY

Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (Crouching Venus), 2013

In its geometric form, the artist’s interpretation of the Venus of Lespugue statuette—which dates back twenty-four to twenty-six thousand years and was discovered in a Pyrenean cave in 1922—draws associations to modernist sculpture, thus invoking long-standing debates about the beginnings of abstraction in art.

By interpreting the already abstracted Venus figure as a large-scale balloon sculpture, Koons heightens the play between abstraction and figuration, both clarifying and obscuring her form. “I look at it and I think of Brancusi,” says Koons. “I can tie it to the history of modernism.”

Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538 (detail). Collection of Uffizi Gallery, Florence © Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY

Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus (detail), c. 1484–1486, Collection of Uffizi Gallery, Florence (detail)

The myriad reference points for this work include Giacometti, Titian, Brancusi, Duchamp, and Elie Nadelman, artists who have approached the female form geometrically—taking it apart only to reassemble it again from those lines, curves, and shapes to underscore an innate sense of beauty and wonder.

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