After a seven-year absence from New York's art scene, Jeff Koons has returned with a solo exhibition at Gagosian gallery that critics are calling disappointingly uninspired. The show, titled "Jeff Koons: Porcelain Series," marks the controversial artist's first New York solo presentation since 2018, featuring large-scale sculptures that transform delicate porcelain figurines into towering stainless steel monuments.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is "Aphrodite" (2016-21), an eight-and-a-half-foot-tall nude sculpture based on a porcelain figurine by the Royal Dux company. The work features Koons' signature unnaturally smooth stainless steel surface and imposing scale, yet fails to generate the awe-inspiring effect that has made the artist famous. Critics describe the piece as more reminiscent of the alien from the 2018 film "Annihilation" than Botticelli's "Birth of Venus," lacking the seductive or overwhelming presence that Koons' earlier works achieved.
The timing of this exhibition is particularly significant given Koons' recent career milestones and controversies. Since his last New York show, also held at Gagosian, Koons became the world's most expensive living artist when his 1986 sculpture "Rabbit" sold for $91.1 million in 2019. During this period, he also switched representation from Gagosian and David Zwirner to their competitor Pace gallery, only to return to Gagosian for this current exhibition. Additionally, Koons faced two separate lawsuits related to his artwork, winning one case while losing the other.
The current exhibition represents a significant departure from Koons' last major New York series debut in 2013, when he presented his "Gazing Ball" sculptures at the same gallery. Those works, which paired blue orbs with white plaster casts of ancient Greco-Roman artworks, received poor critical reception and reportedly failed to attract collectors, though they at least demonstrated artistic evolution from his previous abstract period.
Unfortunately, the "Porcelain Series" shows Koons retreating into familiar territory rather than exploring new creative directions. The exhibition heavily recycles themes from his earlier career, including the erotic elements that characterized his controversial "Made in Heaven" paintings from the 1990s. Works like "Kissing Couple" (2016-25) feature a man and woman locked in an embrace that feels provocative yet safely conventional, lacking the boundary-pushing audacity of his earlier controversial pieces.
Other sculptures in the show continue this pattern of artistic repetition. "Three Graces" (2016-22) depicts three nude women arranging a flower wreath around themselves, revisiting the idol worship themes that dominated Koons' work throughout the 2010s when he increasingly focused on antiquity-inspired art. The piece exemplifies Koons' long-standing fascination with scaling up small objects to monumental proportions, a concept he has explored since the 1980s with works ranging from balloon dogs to Play-Doh sculptures.
Perhaps the most telling example of Koons' creative stagnation is "The Judgment of Paris" (2018-25), a 10-foot-wide painting that directly appropriates muscular figures and a dog from a 16th-century print by Marcantonio Raimondi. Koons reinterprets these borrowed elements in aluminum leaf with loops of pink paint, replacing the original print's ominous sky with a garish sunset background. The work essentially creates a copy of a copy, since Raimondi himself was remaking Raphael's original composition.
This approach to appropriation mirrors Koons' 1980s strategy of reproducing advertisements at grand scale, raising the same questions about authorship and originality that he explored decades ago. Rather than advancing these concepts, the current exhibition simply repackages previously explored ideas without offering new insights or commentary.
In an interview for Gagosian's magazine, Koons emphasized his studio's meticulous efforts to ensure that "The Judgment of Paris" will appear identical 200 years from now as it does today. This focus on permanence and technical perfection, enabled by seemingly unlimited financial resources and technical expertise, has resulted in works that critics argue are just as mundane as the tchotchkes that originally inspired the artist's career.
The exhibition runs through February 28, 2025, but early critical reception suggests it will likely be forgotten long before then. While Koons' established collectors may continue to support his work regardless of artistic merit, the show represents a missed opportunity for one of contemporary art's most commercially successful artists to demonstrate continued creative relevance after his extended absence from New York's competitive gallery scene.
