Displaying items by tag: Jeff Koons

The Whitney Museum of American Art has been having trouble keeping up with the demand to see “Jeff Koons: A Retrospective,” an exhibition that fills most of the museum’s space and was described by Roberta Smith in The New York Times as “the most cogent account of Mr. Koons’s career in over two decades.” And it may be that museumgoers want a last chance to walk through the Whitney as it is currently constituted, before the museum leaves its Marcel Breuer building for its new home, designed by Renzo Piano, in the meatpacking district.

A building that once housed the pharmacy of French King Louis XIV has recently brimmed with activity again—this time, involving blown-glass orbs, steel pipes and curious nozzles. Since January, the Paris-based sculptor Jean-Michel Othoniel has turned this vaulted chamber on the periphery of Versailles' grounds into his makeshift studio.

When the artist finishes installing the three resulting fountain-sculptures later this summer, they will become the  in the palace's gardens in more than 300 years.

Since 2008 Versailles, the lavish regal complex about 18 miles west of central Paris, has held temporary art exhibitions inside its 17th-century gilded ballrooms and manicured gardens. These shows have featured contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami. Mr. Othoniel's commission—part of the total renovation of a garden originally designed by the famed royal landscaper André Le Nôtre —is meant to stand the test of time.

The Grimaldi Forum in Monaco, France, is currently hosting the exhibition “ArtLovers: Stories of Art in the Pinault Collection.” The show features forty works from François Pinault’s illustrious collection, including more than a third that have never been displayed in previous exhibitions of the Collection. Thirty-three artists, including Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, Dan Flavin, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, and Rachel Whiteread will be represented.

The Pinault Collection, which features paintings, sculptures, installations, video, drawings, and more, was assembled by the French businessman François Pinault. Pinault is the founder of the holding company Artemis S.A., which owns Christie’s auction house as well as a number of luxury brands. Pinault currently owns one of the biggest collections of contemporary art worldwide and in 2006, he acquired Venice’s Palazzo Grassi Punta della Dogana to display his collection. The exhibition at the Grimaldi Forum was curated by Martin Bethenod, the Director of the Palazzo Grassi.

The last American retrospective of the work of Jeff Koons, the perma-smiling master of high art and low, took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in the summer of 2008. A week before the show closed, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. It was easy to imagine then, as the US braced for its worst economic crisis in 80 years, that we might never see another Koons retrospective – the costs could never be met, and the American public would surely lose its taste for easy pleasures with giant price tags.

But while the US went bust, the US art market has boomed to even bubblier heights than in the 1980s, when Koons was the poster child for art-world excess. His reputation has skyrocketed; his prices, too. Now he arrives, flashbulbs trailing, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where a 35-year retrospective takes up nearly every room in the joint.

The French multinational luxury goods conglomerate, LVMH Group, announced that the long-awaited Fondation Louis Vuitton Pour la Création (or the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation) will open on October 27 in Paris. The Foundation will be housed in a building commissioned by LVMH’s chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Bernard Arnault, and designed by the Canadian-American architect, Frank Gehry. The €100 million building, which resembles a cloud of glass, is located in Paris’ Bois de Boulogne district.

The 126,000-square-foot structure features 11 exhibition galleries that will house the modern and contemporary art collection of the LVMH Group, which includes works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Takashi Murakami, and Jeff Koons, as well as masterpieces from Arnault’s personal holdings. The Foundation, which promotes contemporary artistic creation both in France and internationally, will also host temporary exhibitions, artist commissions, multi-disciplinary performances, and events.

 Financier, philanthropist, and art collector Eli Broad is suing a German sub-contractor that was hired to create a unique, latticed facade for his forthcoming flagship museum. The Broad Collection, or The Broad for short, was slated to open in downtown Los Angeles by the end of 2014, but officials announced in February that the date had been pushed to 2015 due to construction delays. The $140-million institution will house approximately 2,000 contemporary artworks, including pieces by Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman, Andreas Gursky, and Mark Grotjahn, from the collection of Broad and his wife, Edythe.

The lawsuit, filed on Friday, May 30 in Los Angeles Superior Court, accuses Seele Inc., an architectural engineering and fabrication firm based near Munich, of numerous infractions, including breach of contract, fraud, deceit, and unfair competition. Seele was brought on by Broad and the museum’s general contractor Matt Construction in late 2011 to create the institution’s “veil” -- a honeycomb-esque facade that wraps around the building’s exterior and is expected to be one of The Broad’s most distinctive features. Seele has helmed numerous projects in the U.S., including creating striking exteriors for the Seattle Central Library and the New York Times’s Manhattan headquarters.

On June 25, Jeff Koons’s massive, flowering sculpture “Split-Rocker” will go on view at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. Weighing in at 150 tons and standing 37 feet tall, the sculpture features two halves -- one based on a toy pony belonging to one of Koons’s sons, and the other based on a toy dinosaur. The two pieces come together to form the head of a giant child’s rocker. The work will be covered in over 50,000 living plants, including petunias, begonias, impatiens, geraniums, and marigolds.

Backed by Gagosian Gallery, which represents Koons, and organized by the Public Art Fund and real estate company Tishman Speyer, the installation will coincide with the opening of a Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art on June 27. Best known for his reproductions of banal objects, Koons has never been the subject of a retrospective surveying the full scope of his career. The exhibition at the Whitney will present more than 120 objects dating from 1978 to the present, making it the most comprehensive ever devoted to the artist’s groundbreaking oeuvre.

Amagansett firefighters are working to contain a fire in a guest house on the art dealer Larry Gagosian's Further Lane property. 

The fire, which was suspected to be electrical in origin, was reported after an alarm went off around 4:45 p.m. Firefighters reported light smoke in the crawl space, and they were checking behind walls with thermal imaging cameras.

The iconic 11,000-square-foot house, designed by the late Charles Gwathmey, was heavily damaged in a June 2011 fire that was linked to plumbing work.

On Wednesday, May 14, Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale in New York garnered $364 million, falling well within the auction’s pre-sale estimate of $337 million to $474 million. Of the 79 lots offered, 12 failed to find buyers. While the auction fell short of Christie’s monumental $475 million sale, which took place the evening before, new records were set for twelve artists at Sotheby’s, including Julian Schnabel, Wade Guyton, Rosemarie Trockel, Dan Flavin, Matthew Barney, and Keith Haring.

The top lot of the night was Andy Warhol’s “Six Self-Portraits,” which had resided in a private collection since its creation in 1986. The portraits, which are among the last works created by the pioneering Pop artist, sold for $30.1 million (estimate: $25 million to $35 million). The Warhol works were trailed by Gerhard Richter’s oil-on-canvas painting “Blaud” (1988), which sold to a telephone bidder for $28.7 million (estimate: $25 million to $35 million) and Jeff Koons’ mirror polished stainless steel sculpture with transparent color coating titled “Popeye” (1988), which fetched $28.2 million (estimate on request). The 6 ½-foot tall sculpture was purchased by billionaire casino tycoon and art collector Steve Wynn, who plans to display the work in his Las Vegas casino.

Auction houses expect to sell as much as $2.3 billion of art in New York this month as billionaires from China to Brazil compete for trophy works by Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Jeff Koons in a surging market.

Two weeks of semiannual sales of Impressionist, modern, postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, Sotheby’s (BID) and Phillips begin May 6, with online bidding as early as today. Their combined sales target represents a 77 percent increase from estimates for a similar round of auctions a year ago.