Beschreibung:

PROPERTY FROM A PRESTIGIOUS EUROPEAN COLLECTION Jeff Koons Seal Walrus Trashcans 2003–09 Polychromed aluminium and galvanized steel. 170.2 × 76.2 × 91.4 cm (67 × 30 × 36 in). This work is from an edition of 3 plus 1 artist’s proof.
Provenance Sonnabend Gallery, New York; L&M Arts, New York; Private Collection, Europe Exhibited London, Serpentine Gallery, Jeff Koons Popeye Series, 2 July – 13 September 2009 (another example exhibited); Paris, Galerie Jerome de Noirmont, Jeff Koons Popeye Sculpture, 16 September – 20 November 2010 (another example exhibited) Literature J. Jones, ‘Not just the king of kitsch’, Guardian, London, 30 June 2009, p. 9, (illustrated); B. Lewis, ‘Popeye the Eye-Popper’, Evening Standard, London, 2 July 2009, p. 34, (illustrated); J. Welham, ‘Playing with Popeye – and his inflatable friends’, West End Extra, 3 July 2009 (illustrated); Jeff Koons Popeye Series, exh. cat., London, Serpentine Gallery, 2 July – 13 September, 2009, p. 60 (illustrated); A. Bartl, ‘Geniale Spätzünder’, German Elle, April 2010, p. 136 (illustrated); Jeff Koons Popeye Sculpture, exh. cat., Paris, Galerie Jerome de Noirmont, 16 September –20 November 2010, p. 23 (illustrated); Pierre-Evariste Douaire, ‘Koons est Gonflé’, Clark Magazine #45, November – December 2010 (illustrated with artist); A. Shaw ‘Jeff Koons: The Pain of Inflation’, The Art Newspaper, 16 June 2011; ‘Jeff Koons: Desire of Love’, Korea Joongang, August 2011, p. 337 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay “My work is a support system for people to feel good about themselves and to have confidence in themselves – to enjoy life, to have their life be as enriching as possible, to make them feel secure – a confidence in their own past history, so that they can move on to achieve whatever they want” Jeff Koons “I find that the work for myself is more and more minimal. I’ve returned to the readymade. I’ve returned to really enjoying thinking about Duchamp. This whole world seems to have opened itself up again to me, the dialogue of art” Jeff Koons Jeff Koons has an unrivalled ability to both visually amaze his audience while also combining humour with the philosophical. This has come to characterise his acclaimed multi-disciplinary and richly layered body of work over the past three decades. Seal Walrus Trashcans, from his series Popeye begun in 2002, is full of not only art historical references but also cultural subversions and commentaries. Popeye features both paintings in which images from Koons’s own photos, sensual imagery and magazines are remixed into a playful composition, and sculptures in which inflatable pool toys are juxtaposed with found metal objects. As an integral part of the Popeye series, Seal Walrus Trashcans encapsulates Koons’ major themes such as the interplay between childhood innocence and adult sexuality, the bridging of low and high art, the representation of kitsch within the avant-garde and, most significantly, the fragility and ephemeral nature of life. A hyperreal surrealist masterpiece, Seal Walrus Trashcans depicts two brightly coloured inflatable sea animals wedged into trashcans. Deceiving the eye and brain, the seal and walrus are each a facsimile of an inflatable plastic swimming pool toy that Koons has cast in aluminium and then meticulously painted to reproduce both the colours and texture of the original down to every ripple and soft crease around each seam. Then, in an innovative and technically masterful twist never seen before in his work, Koons has entwined, as if entrapped, each of the assisted readymade toys into a true ready-made, an unaltered trashcan of the kind seen on New York City sidewalks. A first reading of this absurd montage would suggest that the inflatable swimming equipment references and celebrates the banal, everyday consumption of the American middle class with its cheap plastic squeezable toys that populate every communal swimming pool during the carefree summers of America’s suburban heartland. Yet this seemingly happy, cookie cutter society is only superficially so, their smiles like those of the seal and walrus are only painted on. Entrapped by metallic mesh which physically pierces their bodies, the trashcans suggest a physical and ph