Jeff Koons: A Retrospective

June 27–Oct 19, 2014

A brightly-colored abstract painting by Jeff Koons. Balloons against a silver backdrop.
A brightly-colored abstract painting by Jeff Koons. Balloons against a silver backdrop.

Jeff Koons, Tulips, 1995–98. Oil on canvas; 111 3⁄8 x 131 in. (282.9 x 332.7cm). Private collection. © Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons is widely regarded as one of the most important, influential, popular, and controversial artists of the postwar era. Throughout his career, he has pioneered new approaches to the readymade, tested the boundaries between advanced art and mass culture, challenged the limits of industrial fabrication, and transformed the relationship of artists to the cult of celebrity and the global market. Yet despite these achievements, Koons has never been the subject of a retrospective surveying the full scope of his career. Comprising almost 150 objects dating from 1978 to the present, this exhibition will be the most comprehensive ever devoted to the artist’s groundbreaking oeuvre. By reconstituting all of his most iconic works and significant series in a chronological narrative, the retrospective will allow visitors to understand Koons’s remarkably diverse output as a multifaceted whole.

This exhibition will be the artist’s first major museum presentation in New York, and the first to fill nearly the entirety of the Whitney's Marcel Breuer building with a single artist’s work. It will also be the final exhibition to take place there before the Museum opens its new building in the Meatpacking District in 2015. 

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective is organized by Scott Rothkopf, Nancy and Steve Crown Family Curator and Associate Director of Programs.

The exhibition travels to the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris (November 26, 2014–April 27, 2015) and to the Guggenheim Bilbao (June 12–September 27, 2015).


Leadership support for this exhibition is provided by

The exhibition is sponsored by

Significant support is provided by Neil G. Bluhm; Steven A. and Alexandra M. Cohen Foundation, Inc.; Susan and John Hess; Cari and Michael J. Sacks; and the National Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Major support is provided by Anne Cox Chambers, Nancy C. and A. Steven Crown, Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson, Lise and Michael Evans, Anne Dias Griffin and Kenneth Griffin, Dakis Joannou, Allison and Warren Kanders, Amy and John Phelan, Brett and Daniel Sundheim, and David Zwirner Gallery.

Generous support is provided by The Broad Art Foundation; Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy; Wendy Fisher; Mr. and Mrs. J. Tomilson Hill; Antonio Homem, Sonnabend Gallery; Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins; Liz and Eric Lefkofsky; Linda and Harry Macklowe; the Mugrabi Collection; Brooke and Daniel Neidich; Almine Rech Gallery; David Teiger; and Fern and Lenard Tessler.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Opening Dinner sponsored by


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Easyfun-Ethereal

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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.

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Junkyard, 2002

A painting of spread legs, peas in a pod, and long hair collaged over a junkyard.
A painting of spread legs, peas in a pod, and long hair collaged over a junkyard.

Jeff Koons, Junkyard, 2002. Oil on canvas; 102 x 138 in. (259.1 x 350.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; promised gift of Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner P. 2011.215. © Jeff Koons

Like most of the Easyfun-Ethereal paintings, Junkyard melds diverse sources into a labyrinthine composition of dizzying layers. Expanding on the legacy of Pop artist James Rosenquist’s cropping and silhouetting of images, Koons uses computer software to create even more complicated spatial arrangements. The layers that are immediately identifiable in the center of the painting (flowing blonde hair, chain-link fencing, and peapods) overlap and are flanked by snippets of visual information that prove much harder to decipher. Images of fishnet stockings, a lacey negligee, and a junkyard intersect and interlock in a kaleidoscopic fashion. The combination and confusion of these sexual and mundane references call into question the relationship of sensuality to consumer culture, while evoking the layered and changing graphics common to the internet and computer screens.

Events

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Audio guides

A brightly-colored abstract painting by Jeff Koons. Balloons against a silver backdrop.
A brightly-colored abstract painting by Jeff Koons. Balloons against a silver backdrop.

Jeff Koons, Tulips, 1995–98. Oil on canvas; 111 3⁄8 x 131 in. (282.9 x 332.7cm). Private collection. © Jeff Koons

This audio guide features commentary by artist Jeff Koons, Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney's Nancy and Steve Crown Family Curator and Associate Director of Programs, Michelle Kuo, editor of Artforum magazine, and Amy Adler, the Emily Kempin Professor at New York University Law School.

View guide

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

View 5 works

In the News

"He's a marvelous artist . . . a master with formidable aesthetic intelligence and a very great deal of nerve."
—The New Yorker (audio slide show)

"Lucid, challenging, brilliantly installed"
—The New York Times

"The perfect final show for the Whitney’s building."
—New York Magazine

"The Whitney show makes a strong case for the rigor and, often, the beauty of Koons’s art, justifying the avidity of the collectors for whom his works are coveted trophies."
—The New Yorker

"At 59, Mr. Koons may be one of the most famous living artists around—and the most expensive at auction. . . . But this will be the first time American audiences will see the sweep of his more than three-decade career in one gulp, 1978 to the present."
—The New York Times

"Jeff Koons, Man of the Hour"
—W Magazine


By the Numbers: The Facts and Figures Behind Jeff Koons’s Massive, Awe-Inspiring Show at the Whitney
—T Magazine

Video: "Jeff Koons' Philosophy of Perfection"
—Nowness

"If you’ve been having trouble sleeping lately, it’s probably due to the unquenchable feeling of excitement and anticipation roiling the city—if not the world—in the lead up to the Whitney Museum’s Jeff Koons: A Retrospective."
—Gallerist

"What Inspires Me Is Feeling" by Jeff Koons
—Art in America

"How to Make a Koons"
—Vanity Fair

On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

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