Jeff Koons: A Retrospective
June 27–Oct 19, 2014
Celebration
8
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.
Boy with Pony, 1995–2008
Jeff Koons, Boy with Pony, 1995–2008. Oil on canvas; 136 1/2 x 107 in. (346.7 x 271.8 cm). Private collection. © Jeff Koons
The figures in this painting were inspired, in part, by Pablo Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse (1906) and Koons’s fond memories of regular trips as a child to his family’s farm outside York, Pennsylvania. For Koons, standing before a pony, with its mixture of power, size, and innocence, was awe-inspiring, a response the canvas evokes through its extraordinarily precise articulation in paint. The artist began by photographing the toys against a reflective Mylar backdrop. He then broke down the image into thousands of discrete units separated by sinuous contours. This design was transferred to the canvas with the aid of a projector and stencils and filled by his assistants with myriad colors, each carefully distinguished from the next. For Koons, these crisp distinctions underscore the “objective” quality of the painting and augment our trust in it, in contrast to traditional blended shading in which gradient steps are not so clearly discerned.