Frieze New York 2025

Hulk Elvis represents for me both Western and Eastern cultures, a sense of a guardian, a protector, that at the same time is capable of bringing the house down. I have tried to blend these cultural histories together. The Hulk represents a duality that shifts from a superhero to a divine being.
—Jeff Koons

Gagosian is pleased to announce a solo presentation of works by Jeff Koons at Frieze New York 2025, nearly twenty-five years since the first collaboration between the artist and the gallery. Three sculptures—Hulk (Organ) (2004–14), Hulk (Tubas) (2004–18), and Hulk (Dragon and Turtle) (2004–21), all from the Hulk Elvis series—are on view against a specially produced immersive vinyl backdrop. All the sculptures are from Koons’s own collection, and the artist participated in every stage of the exhibition process, from the initial selection to the design of the booth and the layout of the installation.

Drawing on sources including figures from classical antiquity, everyday objects, and contemporary icons, Koons explores the conjunction of the readymade and the sublime in lavishly realized artifacts and tableaux. Identifying commonalities throughout cultural history, he confronts fundamental aspects of the human psyche by working through such unifying concepts as the new, the banal, and the sublime. Koons continues to produce highly polished—but nonetheless accessible—objects and images that exude beauty, sexuality, spirituality, and even happiness.

The polychrome bronze and mixed-media sculptures at Frieze New York pair the Incredible Hulk superhero with a variety of collaged objects. The works’ surfaces mimic the gloss of vinyl inflatables—forms with which Koons has worked since his early career, pairing their distinctive qualities with those of bronze since Aqualung from the Equilibrium series (1985). Hulk (Dragon and Turtle) finds the superhero merged with two pool toys styled after cartoon animals. Hulk (Organ), a functioning organ incorporating keys, pipes, and a pedalboard that extend from the towering figure’s upper body, legs, and shoulders, features a sound element. Hulk (Tubas) has a musical component too, multiple brass bells of the titular horn surrounding the figure’s head and torso. As their titles suggest, these two works both double as functioning instruments capable of intense volume.

For Koons, the Hulk embodies both a current in Western popular culture and the Eastern figure of the “guardian god.” Endowed with protective abilities, the character’s capacity for violence also renders him a fundamentally human animal. Philip Tinari, writing in the catalogue for Hulk Elvis at Gagosian Hong Kong (2014), observes that the Hulk first appeared in 1962, and was thus “a creature of the Cold War and of Camelot.” In these works, its wide-legged stance also refers to that of Elvis in Andy Warhol’s images of the iconic rock ’n’ roller. By now, however, Bruce Banner’s alter ego has largely shed such national and cultural associations, coming to symbolize instead something primordial and universal. Finally, Koons’s painting Triple Hulk Elvis III (2007), which incorporates the superhero’s form alongside other elements including a partial image of foundational rock band Led Zeppelin, is reproduced along with fragmented details on the booth’s vinyl backdrop.

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