Jeff Koons: A Retrospective

Koons staged his first solo gallery exhibition, Equilibrium, in 1985. The show presented a multilayered allegory of, in Koons’s words, unattainable “states of being” or salvation. Cast-bronze floatation devices, for example, maintained a permanent inflatedness, yet they would kill rather than save their users. On the walls hung framed, unaltered Nike posters, procured by Koons from the company’s headquarters, that conjoined the perfection of appropriated prints with that of the famous athletes they featured. The exhibition’s best-known works remain the tanks in which basketballs miraculously hover. These sculptures expand philosophically on The New; while that series addressed the perfect moment of creation, Koons considers Equilibrium a moment of pure potential: “Equilibrium is before birth, it’s in the womb, it’s about what is prior to life and after death. It’s this ultimate state of the eternal that is reflected in this moment.”