[Koons’s] work is packed with an art-historical consciousness, and critics and historians have linked it to Surrealism, Hyperrealism, Pop, Minimalism—you name it, it’s all in there—but the results are never didactic or academic. They’re as accessible as products in a supermarket.
—Ingrid Sischy, Vanity Fair, March 2001
Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of eight new paintings by Jeff Koons. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles since 1987.
These new works for Gagosian are part of Koons’s ongoing Easyfun series, which was first shown in November 1999 in New York and includes a recent commission for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, entitled Easyfun-Ethereal. The collage-like paintings are initially conceptualized through computer-scanned images that Koons pieces together, melding often unrelated objects; then, with photo-realistic precision, they are painted on to large canvases, bringing twenty-first-century technology to ancient technique.
Beneath their seemingly innocent and ecstatic cartoon surfaces, the paintings are psychologically charged with aspects of need, desire, and sexuality. This adult’s view of pleasure distinguishes the new paintings from his 1994 Celebration series, which viewed life through the eyes of a child. Even though both series employ many of the same techniques of execution, gone are the hard-edged surfaces of the Celebration paintings—everything in the new works has become wet-into-wet painting.