Thursday, August 6, 2009

Art history, Koons-style

Jeff Koons, Girl with Dolphin and Monkey (The Whitney Museum of American Art 75th Anniversary Photography Portfolio), 2006, chromogenic crystal archive print.
'I’m so involved in contemporary art myself that I’m much more interested in art from a different time. I have a little bit of a sense what it’s like to be alive today, to try and make work today, so contemporary art isn’t so important to me. I’m more interested in what it meant to be alive, to be trying to make art, in other times, in a very different culture.'


Jeff Koons in front of Popeye (2003, oil on canvas) at his Chelsea studio, New York 2003. Photo: Catarina Åström.

'Each of these broad sweeps is hand-painted with very small brushes, we never use sponges or anything larger. The whole art work is a gesture and all these gestures are about doing something with your life, about what you really want to do. This is very fluid, at a distance you can see the imagery, but up close it is very abstract. They’re about [the] history of European art. I love it when there’s a revelation in art, when you see things you have not seen before, connections that you make yourself, not that you’re supposed to make, when those things are there for you. There are French 19th-century brushstrokes we’re painting alongside the Magic Marker lines ... they really work together.'

Both quotes are Jeff Koons, interviewed by Adrian Dannatt in The Art Newspaper.

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