American artist Jeff Koons is one of the best-known artists in the world.
His work has sold for multi-millions at auction and is some of the most sought after art on the planet.
Now, Koons's 35 year career will go on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
From June 27 until October 19, art lovers can experience ‘Jeff Koons: A Retrospective’.
Among Koons's best known work is his ‘Balloon Dog’ series.
Last year at Christie’s auction house in New York, ‘Balloon Dog’ fetched $58.4m (€43m), the highest auction price for a work by a living artist.
The yellow sibling to ‘Balloon Dog’ is one of the more than 130 works of art now on display at the Whitney Museum.
Other over-sized, shiny, inflatable sculptures on display include a light pink moon and a purple hanging heart.
Koons said the shiny inflatables represent inner strength and affirmation.
“So if you look at a reflective surface, it reflects you and it affirms you. It affirms your existence.
If you move, the abstraction changes, it shifts. And again, this is affirmation of your existence.
So it’s bringing back a sense of acceptance, bringing it back to the self”, Koons told Reuters Television.
This is Koon’s first large-scale museum exhibition in New York and the first time the work of a single artist has taken over nearly ever floor of the Whitney Museum.
It is also the last exhibition at the Whitney Museum’s Breuer building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
A new Whitney Museum has been built downtown and will open in 2015.
Koons said the exhibition inside the Breuer building brings his career full circle.
“I’m really thrilled. To have my retrospective be the last exhibition in the Breuer building is also very meaningful.
“As being part of the community here in New York and really in part of the world, to have experienced all the different exhibitions that were here, really meaningful moments”, he said.
Visitors to the museum will experience Koon’s evolution from his 1980 series of sculptures featuring vacuum cleaners, to his take on celebrity with a statue of Michael Jackson and his pet chimpanzee Bubbles and an inflatable Incredible Hulk.
The exhibition is a comprehensive cover of Koon’s artistic range from the mundane to the magnificent, from childlike innocence to adult erotica.
“I think my vision within art is really to be, to try to remove judgement, to remove criticism, that people are open to and accepting.
“First of all to themselves and then once you learn to accept yourself, then you can go forward and you can accept others.
“And objects and images, they’re metaphors for this. They are metaphors for self-acceptance and the acceptance of others”, the artist said.
After New York City, ‘Jeff Koons: A Retrospective’ will travel to Europe, visiting Paris and Bilbao.
