Students persuade Jeff Koons to stage rare UK art show
Oct 26, 2018 16:52:33 GMT
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Post by IggyWiggy on Oct 26, 2018 16:52:33 GMT
Jeff Koons, one of the superstars of the contemporary art world, is to get a rare UK museum show and it is largely thanks not to curators, but the Edgar Wind Society for Art History.
The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the world’s oldest public museum, announced on Friday that it would stage a major Koons show in 2019 displaying works, most of which have never been seen in the UK.
Alexander Sturgis, the museum’s director, said it was students who enticed the American artist. Sturgis said the university’s Edgar Wind Society decided to set up a contemporary art prize and the first winner was Koons, so they invited him to Oxford.
“In an entirely typical way Jeff got on a plane, flew to Oxford for the day, accepted the prize, spoke to the students, was incredibly giving of his time and incredibly gracious in every respect and then flew back to New York that same night,” said Sturgis.
From that, plans have emerged for a mini-retrospective of Koons’s career featuring some of his best-known works.
Sturgis said Koons pushed hard at the boundaries of what an artist was or could be. “It is hard to think of any other artist of the last 50 years who has such a significant and influential place in how we think about what art is today.”
His works, whether giant shiny casts of balloon animals or repainted masterpieces with the addition of a blue bauble, attract strong opinions. He is seen by some as an example of everything bad about contemporary art; by others as everything good. At auction his works attract some of the highest prices in the world.
A retrospective of his work was held at the Whitney Museum in New York in 2014, which toured to Paris and Bilbao. But UK public galleries have been more reticent about staging Koons’s shows with one of the few being held at the Serpentine in London in 2009.
Sturgis said artists such as Koons, with his huge commercial success, were sometimes viewed with a degree of suspicion. “It seems absurd to suggest that a Jeff Koons show is a risk, but I think there is a degree of establishment anxiety about the place that he holds in the art world.”
The Oxford show will be curated by Norman Rosenthal and will feature 17 works, 14 of them being exhibited in the UK for the first time. They will include Seated Ballerina, a 2-metre high mirror-polished stainless sculpture; and the 2.6-metre high Balloon Venus (Magenta).
• Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean runs from 7 February to 9 June 2019
www.theguardian.com
The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the world’s oldest public museum, announced on Friday that it would stage a major Koons show in 2019 displaying works, most of which have never been seen in the UK.
Alexander Sturgis, the museum’s director, said it was students who enticed the American artist. Sturgis said the university’s Edgar Wind Society decided to set up a contemporary art prize and the first winner was Koons, so they invited him to Oxford.
“In an entirely typical way Jeff got on a plane, flew to Oxford for the day, accepted the prize, spoke to the students, was incredibly giving of his time and incredibly gracious in every respect and then flew back to New York that same night,” said Sturgis.
From that, plans have emerged for a mini-retrospective of Koons’s career featuring some of his best-known works.
Sturgis said Koons pushed hard at the boundaries of what an artist was or could be. “It is hard to think of any other artist of the last 50 years who has such a significant and influential place in how we think about what art is today.”
His works, whether giant shiny casts of balloon animals or repainted masterpieces with the addition of a blue bauble, attract strong opinions. He is seen by some as an example of everything bad about contemporary art; by others as everything good. At auction his works attract some of the highest prices in the world.
A retrospective of his work was held at the Whitney Museum in New York in 2014, which toured to Paris and Bilbao. But UK public galleries have been more reticent about staging Koons’s shows with one of the few being held at the Serpentine in London in 2009.
Sturgis said artists such as Koons, with his huge commercial success, were sometimes viewed with a degree of suspicion. “It seems absurd to suggest that a Jeff Koons show is a risk, but I think there is a degree of establishment anxiety about the place that he holds in the art world.”
The Oxford show will be curated by Norman Rosenthal and will feature 17 works, 14 of them being exhibited in the UK for the first time. They will include Seated Ballerina, a 2-metre high mirror-polished stainless sculpture; and the 2.6-metre high Balloon Venus (Magenta).
• Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean runs from 7 February to 9 June 2019
www.theguardian.com
