Jeff Koons: A Retrospective

Easyfun and Easyfun-Ethereal signal the start of Koons’s engagement with hand-painted oils on canvas, a medium he continues to use today. For Koons, this centuries-old tradition conveyed a greater warmth and psychological energy than the more mechanical means of his earlier paintings, yet his new process was anything but old-fashioned. As with the Banality sculptures, he began each composition with readymade images, which he grafted onto paper, scanned, and manipulated digitally. To execute each painting, Koons worked with teams of assistants for up to six months, painstakingly transferring his collage to canvas entirely by hand. Although these canvases brim with exuberance and abundance, their disjointed elements and phantom limbs can also hint at the manic and disorienting side of overconsumption.