Jeff Koons: A Retrospective

Koons conceived his series Celebration in 1994 as a paean to the milestones that mark a year and the cycle of life. Fittingly, it was inspired by an invitation to design a calendar for which he created photographs that referred to holidays and other joyous events. These images formed the basis for large-scale sculptures and paintings that the artist hoped might serve both as archetypal symbols accessible to a broad public and as a personal reminder to his abducted son that the boy was constantly on his father’s mind. Taken as a whole, the sixteen paintings and twenty sculptures of Celebration evoke birth, love, religious observances, and procreation, whether in the form of a cracked egg, a giant heart, the paraphernalia of a birthday party, or the sexually suggestive curves and crevices of a balloon animal.