Jeff Koons

My Easyfun-Ethereal paintings are very layered. My interest has always been to create art that can change with any culture or society viewing it. When I look at the paintings and realize all the historical references, it’s as if, for a moment, all ego is lost to meaning.
—Jeff Koons

Gagosian is pleased to present Easyfun-Ethereal, seven large-scale paintings by Jeff Koons, which were first presented together at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin in 2000. Three of the paintings are on generous loan from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Also on view will be Woman Reclining (2010–14), a granite sculpture from the Antiquity series.

Following the enthusiastic public response to Balloon Flower (Blue), the large mirror-polished stainless-steel sculpture installed in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin in 1999, the Deutsche Guggenheim commissioned the first seven of the Easyfun-Ethereal paintings: mural-sized tableaux that combine cutout photographs of packaged foods, fragments of faces, limbs, and hair, amusement park scenes, and paradisiacal landscapes into images of convulsive beauty.

The Easyfun-Ethereal series, which eventually expanded to twenty-four paintings, allowed Koons to work more spontaneously, in contrast to the detailed production demands of the Celebration sculptures. Working from computer-scanned reproductions taken from various printed media, as well as from his own photographs, he considers the use of gesture, expression, and eroticism in artistic precedents and American advertising. Multilayered yet possessing a classical order, the resulting paintings marry the immediacy of collage with Romantic grandeur.