THE PAINTER & THE SCULPTOR
FRANKFURT, GERMANY
20 June – 23 September, 2012
Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988 Banality
porcelain
© Jeff Koons
This summer, the Schirn Kunsthalle and the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung will be devoting themselves to the work of the U.S. American artist Jeff Koons (born in 1955), who has played a pioneering role in the contemporary art world since the 1980s. The two concurrent shows will deliberately separate the sculptural and painterly aspects of his oeuvre and present each in a context of its own. Encompassing some forty paintings, the presentation entitled “Jeff Koons. The Painter” at the Schirn will focus primarily on the artist’s structural development as a painter. With motifs drawn from a diverse range of high and pop-cultural sources, his monumental painted works combine hyper-realistic and gestural elements to form complexes as compact in imagery as they are with regard to content. In the show “Jeff Koons. The Sculptor” at the Liebieghaus, on the other hand, altogether around 50 world-famous as well as entirely new sculptures by Jeff Koons will enter into dialogues with the historical building and a sculpture collection spanning five millennia. Jeff Koons’s Antiquity, a new series in which he explores antique art and its central motif – Eros – will debut in Frankfurt on this occasion.
