Jeff Koons’s “Banality” sculptures of the late 1980s are anything but ordinary: few can easily forget the sight of the Pink Panther embracing a partially naked woman, for one. But there’s nothing quite so out of the ordinary about the artist’s recent creations such as his 2016–21 sculpture Aphrodite, an eight and-half-foot-tall nude that made its public debut at Gagosian gallery in New York last week. Standing before it, I felt so unstimulated that I wished I were somewhere else entirely.
A stainless steel goddess based on a porcelain figurine by the Royal Dux company, Aphrodite has an unnaturally smooth surface and a towering scale, putting it less in line with Botticelli’s Birth of Venus than the alien at the end of the 2018 film Annihilation. In theory, Aphrodite should succeed in awing viewers by making them feel small or seduced. But the sculpture, and all the others in this show, can’t even accomplish this basic task. Enabled by a seemingly limitless amount of money and technical willpower, Koons has produced a body of work that’s just as banal as the tchotchkes that once inspired him not that that will necessarily deter his collectors, of course.
You’d be forgiven for wanting something more provocative especially because it’s been seven years since Koons last had a solo show in New York, the city where his sprawling studio is based. Between this show and the last one in New York, also at Gagosian, Koons became the world’s most expensive living artist, with his 1986 sculpture Rabbit selling for $91.1 million in 2019. He departed Gagosian and David Zwirner for their mega-gallery competitor, Pace, then returned to Gagosian once more, and faced two lawsuits over his art, winning one and losing the other.
The last time Koons premiered a new series in New York was even longer ago 2013, to be exact, when he showed his “Gazing Ball” sculptures, which pair blue orbs with white plaster casts of ancient Greco Roman artworks. The “Gazing Ball” series flopped with critics and seemingly with collectors, too but it did at least feel like a new direction for Koons, who mostly worked in abstraction for the decade or so before them. The Gagosian show augurs no similar shift for Koons, who is stuck repeating himself, unashamedly cribbing ideas from past works.
The erotomania that animated his divisive “Made in Heaven” paintings of the ’90s returns at Gagosian in a form that does not feature the artist in various states of arousal, thankfully with works such as Kissing Couple (2016–25). In that sculpture, a man and a woman bend toward each other, locking lips in a way that feels salacious without pushing the envelope too much. Notions of idol worship recurred throughout Koons’s art of the 2010s, a period when he increasingly turned his gaze to the art of antiquity; those ideas are back in pieces such as Three Graces (2016–22), in which three nude women string a wreath of flowers around themselves. Plus, ever since the ’80s, Koons has always been fascinated by how tiny objects suddenly gain big value when they’re scaled up. At Gagosian, Koons turns his attention not toward shiny balloon dogs and piles of Play Doh but porcelain figurines that could be held in one’s hand.
This latest body of work is intentionally about stealing from the past. With the 10 foot wide painting The Judgment of Paris (2018–25), Koons culls some muscular nudes and a dog from a 16th-century print by Marcantonio Raimondi, then recasts them in aluminum leaf and smears them with loops of pink paint. Utilizing a shlocky sunset as a background in place of the original print’s ominous sky, Koons is essentially remaking Raimondi, who was himself remaking Raphael. But Koons is also copying himself, asking the same questions about authorship that he did back in the ’80s, when he painted ads at a grand scale.
With nothing new left to say, Koons instead focuses on dressing up previously explored concepts in new clothes. In an interview for Gagosian’s magazine, he said that he and his studio took great pains to ensure that The Judgment of Paris will look the same 200 years from now as it does right now. Poor guy. He has no idea that no one will thinking about The Judgment of Paris or anything else in this forgettable show, on view through February 28 by this time next year.