20/11/2025
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 n**e 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,” Alex Greenberger writes.
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.
“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.”
Read more: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/reviews/jeff-koons-gagosian-porcelain-series-review-1234762301/
