Installation Views

Works Exhibited

About

Hulk Elvis represents for me both Western and Eastern culture, a sense of a guardian, a protector, that at the same time is capable of bringing the house down.
—Jeff Koons

Gagosian Hong Kong is pleased to present Hulk Elvis, Jeff Koons’s first major solo exhibition in Asia.

With sources as diverse as children’s art, comic-book characters, and figures from classical antiquity, Koons draws a common thread through cultural history with works that attempt to touch the core of the human psyche. Working through conceptual constructs including the new, the banal, and the sublime, his art has evolved from its literal, staid beginnings in readymades to baroque creations that extol innocence, beauty, sexuality, and happiness in confounding combinations of abstraction, figuration, and sumptuous effect.

Works from the ongoing series Hulk Elvis range from precision-machined bronze sculptures—inspired by an inflatable of the popular comic-book hero and extruded in three dimensions—to large-scale paintings that dazzle with energy and exactitude yet mystify with complex permutations and combinations of figurative and abstract elements. The sculptures, whose polychromed surfaces mimic the gloss of vinyl inflatables, pair the Hulk superhero with incongruous props: a wheelbarrow filled with live flowers, a crew of inflatable toy animals, a precise replica of the Liberty Bell. In Hulk (Organ) (2004–14), keys, pipes, and a pedalboard jut out from the figure’s torso, legs, and shoulders; as the title suggests, the sculpture doubles as a fully functioning instrument. For Koons, the character represents not only Western comic-book culture, but Eastern guardian gods as well: “They’re there as protectors, but at the same time they can become very, very violent. . . . The Hulks are like that—they’re really high-testosterone symbols.”

In Hulk Elvis paintings, a charged mix of nudes and inflatable animals jostles against realistically rendered landscapes, magnified gestural brushwork, and underlying dot screens. Titles—such as Landscape (Waterfall II) (2007) and Couple (Dots) Landscape (2009)—string together dominant compositional elements. The exuberance of image and texture is rendered, paradoxically, with an uncanny level of precision into a wealth of smooth, vivid detail, and images are manipulated and interwoven into volatile palimpsests of color and form. In these spectacular pictorial inventions—which reject any attempt by the eye to find a resting place—silhouettes slice through multiple layers, contours of images surface rhythmically across the field of vision, and forms loom and recede in the swirling fervor of color and line.

Laws of Motion

Laws of Motion

Catalyzed by Laws of Motion—a group exhibition pairing artworks from the 1980s on by Jeff Koons, Cady Noland, Rosemarie Trockel, and Jeff Wall with contemporary sculptures by Josh Kline and Anicka Yi—Wyatt Allgeier discusses the convergences and divergences in these artists’ practices with an eye to the economic worlds from which they spring.

Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2019

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2019

The Fall 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Sinking (2019) by Nathaniel Mary Quinn on its cover.

Intimate Grandeur: Glenstone Museum

Intimate Grandeur: Glenstone Museum

Paul Goldberger tracks the evolution of Mitchell and Emily Rales’s Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland. Set amid 230 acres of pristine landscape and housing a world-class collection of modern and contemporary art, this graceful complex of pavilions, designed by architects Thomas Phifer and Partners, opened to the public in the fall of 2018.

Visions of the Self: Jenny Saville on Rembrandt

Visions of the Self: Jenny Saville on Rembrandt

Jenny Saville reveals the process behind her new self-portrait, painted in response to Rembrandt’s masterpiece Self-Portrait with Two Circles.

Jeff Koons: Easyfun-Ethereal

Jeff Koons: Easyfun-Ethereal

Learn more about Jeff Koons’s Easyfun-Ethereal series in this video featuring Rebecca Sternthal, one of the organizers behind the most recent exhibition of these works in New York.

RxART

The Bigger Picture
RxART

Derek Blasberg speaks with Diane Brown, president and founder of RxART, and with contributing artists Dan Colen, Urs Fischer, and Jeff Koons about the transformative power of visual art.

Jeff Koons

The Bigger Picture
Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons speaks with Alison McDonald and Maura Harty about his longstanding commitment to protecting the rights of children.

Jeff Koons Glenn Fuhrman

In Conversation
Jeff Koons Glenn Fuhrman

The FLAG Art Foundation hosted a conversation between Jeff Koons and FLAG founder Glenn Fuhrman, in which the two discuss the dichotomy between sexuality and childhood innocence in Koons’s oeuvre, remaking Made in Heaven with Lady Gaga, what drives Koons to make more work, and several works including Cat on a Clothesline (1994–2001) and Winter Bears (1988).

The Last 36 Hours

The Last 36 Hours

Derek Blasberg speaks with Scott Rothkopf, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, about the last thirty-six hours of the Jeff Koons retrospective, which also marked the end of the museum’s tenure in uptown Manhattan.

Split-Rocker: A Landscaping Perspective

Split-Rocker: A Landscaping Perspective

Jeff Koons’s flowering sculpture Split-Rocker, at once imposing and adorable, has cast a spell on New York City’s Rockefeller Center. Derek Blasberg interviews Matt Donham, Koons’s landscape designer on the project, to find out more.

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective

Jeff Koons’s first, mammoth one-man show opens at the Whitney today, which is also the last show at the museum’s Madison Avenue location.

Cover of the book Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball Paintings

Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball Paintings

$100
Cover of the book Jeff Koons, published in 2017

Jeff Koons

$80
Front of Jeff Koons: Split-Rocker Notecard Set

Jeff Koons: Split-Rocker Notecard Set

$15
Jeff Koons: Split-Rocker Plate

Jeff Koons: Split-Rocker Plate

$978
Jeff Koons: Banality Series Bread and Butter Plate

Jeff Koons: Banality Series Bread and Butter Plates

$558
Jeff Koons: Banality Series espresso cup

Jeff Koons: Banality Series Espresso Set

$1,174
Jeff Koons: Banality Series Platter

Jeff Koons: Banality Series Platter

$558
Jeff Koons: Play-Doh Plate

Jeff Koons: Play-Doh Plate

$978
Jeff Koons: Elephant Plate

Jeff Koons: Elephant Plate

$978