Jeff Koons. Porcelain Series
Gagosian, New York
From November 13 until February 28, 2026
It’s hard for me to be objective about Jeff Koons. I’ve done multiple Muse Magazine cover stories on him: one in 2014 and again in 2022. I first interviewed him almost twenty years ago for a fashion magazine, accompanied by visuals from a well-known photographer. The pictures capture Jeff in full Tyvek hazmat suit with an N95 surgical mask covering his mouth like some get-up from the movie Contagion; he is virtually unrecognizable. But even in full view, Jeff Koons remains a sort of permanent enigma.
I asked Richard Prince once about their relationship and Richard says that Jeff’s personality, and commitment, has been consistent throughout. Richard remembers when Jeff was installing his vacuum cleaners in the New Museum windows in 1980. He floated to Jeff the idea of using the appliance boxes as pedestals for his readymades, resting on packaging in lieu of laurels. Except Jeff already had a unique vision in place for their plexiglass entombment. Richard also regrets he didn’t buy one of Jeff’s equilibrium tanks primary, either from International With Monument or maybe it was a group show at 303 Gallery. “I couldn’t afford it,” recalls Prince, “They were like $2,500 and I didn’t know how to curate [store] them, either. Stupid me. I didn’t realize you could leave the liquid out of the tank and leave the basketball at the bottom until the time came when you wanted to have it displayed. Then you could just ring up Jeff’s studio. It didn’t occur to me that you could do that. I kind of screwed the pooch there.” Fast forward forty five years later and there’s Jeff Koons last Thursday night at the Gagosian opening for Richard Prince’s Folk Songs, supporting his friend’s latest body of work.
Tucked away in one of Prince’s new archive paintings is a picture of a giant black bobblehead dog, which is an unfinished work that Richard has upstate at his Rensselaerville studio. There was talk briefly that Richard Prince might include this piece, the bobblehead dog sculpture, in his exhibition on 24th Street, but Richard worried that Jeff Koons owns the puppy image so singularly in contemporary art that any attempt to introduce a fresh twist will ultimately feel derivative. Imagine some painter now trying to serve up their take on Marilyn Monroe and it not giving Andy Warhol somehow. Almost impossible. There is, of course, a counter argument to be made here. “Most people don’t make anything special enough to get ripped off,” John Currin will tell you. His comment sprung from an exchange I had with John after seeing his Fortune Teller painting from 2015 and asking him if the crystal ball depicted was a nod to Jeff Koons Gazing Ball series. He was mortified at the idea people might see him as counterfeiting Jeff. But did Manet knock off Titian for his Olypmia? Did Rubens steal from da Vinci for The Tiger Hunt? “Using other artists’ vocabularies,” Jeff explained to me in a 2007 interview, “Is like stringing popcorn on a thread, a way of connecting with humanity.” And so Jeff continues his conversation with the ancients as his Porcelain Series exhibition makes it debut this month in Chelsea at the old Mary Boone space now occupied by Gagosian as well.
New paintings feature photorealistic backgrounds taken from Spranger, Carracci and Marcantonio Raimondi with big impasto gestural abstraction obscuring sections of imagery. Elsewhere we find a polychrome stainless steel sculpture of Diana, Roman goddess of the hunt and keeper of the forrest. Perhaps Walt Whitman was wrong when he wrote that time avails not. Jeff Koons leverages to his advantage the greater clarity we achieve when looking back across centuries (one reason why Jeff avoids contemporary attire with his lovers sculpture). He quite literally planted his flag in Greece three years ago, when Jeff mounted his Apollo wind spinner on the island of Hydra. You might call this Porcelain Series show a willful historicization of not only his past output, but that of the Counter-Reformation, Cy Twombly, the king’s kitchen and The Judgement of Paris. Distance avails, time avails, Jeff Koons avails.
For further information gagosian.com.
Read Bill Powers 2022 interview with Jeff Koons for Muse Issue 60 at link below:
