Press release -
Jeff Koons – Works from the Astrup Fearnley Collection
Astrup Fearnley Museet celebrates 25 years this year and marks it with several minor exhibitions with significant artists in the collection. Jeff Koons – Works from Astrup Fearnley Collection is the fifth in the series of our anniversary exhibitions.
Jeff Koons (b. 1955) belongs to a long tradition of artists who work with readymade objects and images. He was one of the main figures in the group of Appropriation artists in New York during the late 1970s, developing a highly conceptual art. At first, he presented displays of appropriated everyday objects – domestic appliances, basketballs, diving equipment, plastic bath toys – and objects based on popular aesthetic references, often referred to as ‘kitsch’. By executing his objects and images with a high level of material perfection and blowing them up in scale, he elevated the humble originals to the level of high art.
Behind each series and object lies a story that operates on many different levels, including the artist’s personal narratives. Taken all together, they constitute a body of work expressing fundamental themes related to man and society. Repeatedly in Koon’s work, the viewer is confronted by reflections on social aesthetics, self-acceptance, willpower, sexuality, immortality and death. Koons is highlighting in his art the need to reject all ideas of blame and culpability, which consciously or unconsciously determine our actions, and to break away from social and cultural taboos and intellectual oppression.
“Just as Warhol proposed real news images and iconic pictures as art, Koons appropriates the aesthetics and social and cultural conventions of the masses in order to ‘penetrates mass consciousness’ and propose a populist notion of beauty as art. ‘Where I differ’, he says ‘is that Warhol believed you could penetrate the mass through distribution and I continue to believe you penetrate the mass with ideas’. One could add that Koons’s creative act is also – and not least – a political act, aimed at re-evaluating the cultural references of a class that for too long had been regarded as a cultural outsider.”- Gunnar B. Kvaran, in his introduction to the exhibition’s mini catalogue
This exhibition presents a selection of works from the collection, which shows Koon's works from the late 80's and the development of his groundbreaking oeuvre.
Exhibition period: 28.09.2018 – 20.01.2019
Topics
Astrup Fearnley Museet is a private museum of contemporary art and has since its opening in 1993 been one of the most important art institutions in Oslo. The museum moved to Tjuvholmen in 2012, beautifully located by the Oslo Fjord in a building designed by world-renowned architect Renzo Piano. The museum shows changing exhibitions by leading international and Norwegian contemporary art and houses the Astrup Fearnley Collection. The collection is one of Norway’s most important and extensive private art collections, with iconic works by artists like Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer and Jeff Koons.
