Jeff Koons has been called the world’s most famous, controversial and subversive living artist, and in 2019 he arrived at the world’s oldest public museum.
This major exhibition offered an exciting journey through a career that has pushed at the boundaries of contemporary art. From the moment he burst onto the scene with floating basket balls and ready-made objects to his recent re-working of classical statues and Old Master paintings, Jeff Koons has, at turns, delighted, shocked and intrigued his viewers.
Curated with Koons himself, the show featured 17 major works, from the 1980s to today, 14 of which had never been to the UK before. They included some of his most well-known series such as Equilibrium, Banality, Antiquity and his recent Gazing Ball paintings and sculptures. In the galleries of the Ashmolean Museum, where the collections range from prehistory to the present, Jeff Koons’s work was ‘in conversation’ with the history of art and ideas which has been his focus over the past four decades.
