Marc Glimcher, CEO and President of Pace Gallery, today announced that the gallery will begin representing Jeff Koons exclusively worldwide.
Jeff Koons joins Pace Gallery
Jeff Koons is among the world’s most influential and iconoclastic living artists. Koons has become internationally renowned for his sculptures and paintings that explore meaning in our media-saturated age. Marrying rigorous conceptualism with commercial aesthetics, and spectacular displays with an unparalleled degree of technical finesse, Koons has repeatedly tested the limits of both fabrication and art history, simultaneously redefining Minimalism and Pop Art. His Inflatables, which apply Duchamp’s concept of the “readymade” to objects, rendered in stainless steel and often enlarged to monumental scale, have become emblems of our contemporary era. The mirrored finishes of sculptures such as Rabbit (1986) and Balloon Dog (1994–2000), as well as the more recent Gazing Ball series (2012–21), create opportunities for affirmation through literal self-reflection. These shiny, brightly colored surfaces extend to Koons’s photorealistic paintings, their fusion of pop and art historical references achieving his stated aim to “communicate with the masses.” Transcending time and geography, high and low culture, Koons’s art imparts a visual experience of the sublime.
Pace has always engaged with artists who, like Koons, possess original vision, from 20th-century greats who comprise the gallery’s foundational program such as Calder, Agnes Martin, and Mark Rothko, to contemporary luminaries Sam Gilliam, David Hockney, Maya Lin, Adam Pendleton, James Turrell, and Yoshitomo Nara, who—similarly to Koons— uses imagery from pop culture to reflect on the individual’s sense of self and place in the broader cultural narrative. Koons’s oeuvre also expands on the legacy of Pace artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, whose playful and colossal sculptures are created from a visual lexicon drawn from everyday life.
Jeff Koons comments:
“Sometimes professionally in life we can find ourselves at a crossroads. Going through the last year or so and having the opportunity to reflect on what I would like to achieve with my life’s work in order to bring it to its fullest potential, I have decided that a change in the environment in which my work is viewed and supported would be a positive thing at this time. I have known Marc for decades and I’ve decided that Pace Gallery feels like an exciting situation for me and my work. The most important thing to me is the production of my work and to see these artworks realized so that they can be exhibited and viewed. I think this new change in my life with Pace Gallery will bring about tremendous opportunities for my work.”
Pace’s first collaboration with Koons will be an exhibition of a single seminal sculpture at the gallery’s Palo Alto space in 2022. In 2023, Pace will stage a major exhibition at its flagship gallery in New York devoted to a new body of work from Koons that has been years in the making.
