Jeff Koons: A Retrospective

Equilibrium and Luxury and Degradation established Koons as one of New York’s hottest young artists, and in 1986 he was invited to show his work at the prestigious Sonnabend Gallery in SoHo. He conceived of a series titled Statuary, a term that suggests a borderland just outside the domain of sculpture. Fittingly, Koons based this series on a broad range of readymade models, from corny mass-market curios to distinguished portrait busts and rendered all of these models in stainless steel. By transforming his lowbrow readymades into highbrow art and making his historical sources more contemporary, Koons achieved a kind of democratic leveling of culture. Taken together, the Statuary works evoke a panoply of emotions and styles—melancholy or joy, realism or caricature—and demonstrate Koons’s keen manipulation of ingrained ideas about art and taste.