Norwich Castle set to host Jeff Koons exhibition

Winter Bears, ARTIST ROOMS, Tate and National Galleries of Scotland et al. © Jeff Koons. (Image: Tate and National Galleries of Scotland et al.)

Everything from colourful animal-shaped mirrors to vacuum cleaners to a cheeky-looking caterpillar are currently being unpacked at Norwich Castle where exhibition staff are preparing for their biggest contemporary art exhibition to date – for controversial American artist Jeff Koons created these eclectic, fun and intriguing works of art.

He is a man who is known across the world for his creations which see high art and popular culture collide and which famously split opinion.

People either love or hate Koons' work but there is no doubt he makes a big impact.

His huge Balloon Dog (Orange) sculpture became the most expensive piece of art by a living artist sold at auction when it fetched a colossal US$58.4m (£36.8m) in New York in 2013, and his 40ft floral sculpture Puppy greets visitors outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

Mound of Flowers (1991), ARTIST ROOMS, Tate and National Galleries of Scotland et al. © Jeff Koons (Image: Jeff Koons)

Koons, who was born in Pennsylvania and lives in New York City, has collaborated with the likes of popstar Lady Gaga and fashion designer Stella McCartney, and even turned Michael Jackson and his monkey Bubbles into porcelain statues in the name of art.

Most recently, he has just finished a solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and soon people will be able to enjoy seeing some of his work right here in Norwich.

The new Jeff Koons show – which opens on May 9 and runs until September 6 – is one of the visual arts highlights of this year's Norfolk and Norwich Festival.

It is the only chance to see Jeff Koons' work in the UK in 2015, and the exhibition is being brought to the city by ARTIST ROOMS, a collection of art acquired for the nation by Tate and National Galleries of Scotland.

Bourgeois Bust Jeff and Ilona (1991), ARTIST ROOMS, Tate and National Galleries of Scotland et al. © Jeff Koons (Image: © Jeff Koons)

Harriet Loffler, curator of modern and contemporary art at Norwich Castle, said it was a major coup for the castle and that there was a lot of excitement about the exhibition coming to Norwich.

'It's the first time we have ever worked with a contemporary artist of such an international reputation,' she said.

'We have got a good history of doing contemporary shows but this is, I think, a landmark exhibition.'

She said it was an especially great exhibition to have over the summer holidays because Koons' colourful work is aimed and everyone, young and old.

Art Magazine Ads (Art in America) (19889) ARTIST ROOMS, Tate and National Galleries of Scotland et al. © Jeff Koons (Image: Jeff Koons)

'Jeff Koons' work is incredibly accessible, very playful and he talks about wanting his art to be open for all,' she said.

'He wants it to be read by everybody, and he deliberately uses popular culture and imagery so that people are not in any way alienated by the cultural references, hence the use of animal heads and the like. It's all hopefully a vocabulary that everybody can understand.'

Koons groups his work into different series, and the castle's exhibition features work from six of these spanning his career from 1981 to 2003.

Easyfun is one of the later series, and this will see part of the castle transformed into a hall of colourful animal-shaped mirrors. Visitors will be invited to peer through the silhouettes of everything from a giraffe to an elephant to a donkey.

'What I love about these is that the idea is to place other works within them and in front of them,' said Harriet.

'You are transported into this world of artworks' reflections, a kind of hall of mirrors-like effect within the gallery. Each mirror is a different animal and colour, and you can have quite a lot of fun trying to guess the animals.'

But she said it was not just about fun, it was also about questioning whether fun should be easy and other ideas.

'There are other things happening in this work. It is not just about being childlike and its playfulness, it's also dealing with some kind of much more adult concerns, that idea of the Greek myth of Narcissus who falls in love with his reflection and that leads to his demise.

'Koons is interested in reflections. He's interested in the viewer in the work. He wants people to be reflected, to ask questions about what we are looking at and who we are.'

Popeye is another series and this is represented in the exhibition by Caterpillar, a work which looks like a child's inflatable caterpillar suspended in mid air – but all is not what it seems.

'There's an interesting play with materials in his work, things are a bit deceptive, particularly in the Popeye series where he has taken these beach inflatable toys that we normally associate with being incredibly light, buoyant, plastic, and instead they have been cast in aluminium. Things are not always what they seem and that is true of his work in general,' said Harriet.

'Koons pulls you in to make you start questioning, and I think that is his power. His work is incredibly seductive - the shiny surfaces, his use of colour, the fact that you are reflected in them.

'You can't help but be drawn in and quite seduced by them, and then I think he leaves you questioning, what is this really all about?'

His earliest series to feature in the show is a collection of vacuum cleaners encased in display boxes. Unlikely art some may say, but in these works Koons explores commercialism and people's desire to consume brand new products.

Harriet said: 'It's kind of 'a ready-made,' building on the tradition of Marcel Duchamp's idea of taking a urinal and placing it in a gallery and calling it Fountain. He took an everyday object and said it was art because he said so, and that's very much what Jeff Koons is doing in the works with the vacuum cleaners, taking an object and preserving it in these acrylic boxes. They take on that kind of display method that shops use but yet they are preserved in perpetuity.'

His shop-inspired displays continue with his next series, Equilibrium, with basketballs displayed in cases, and posters of basketball players.

'There's always that fine line between, is this advertising, is this art?' said Harriet.

'Is this a shop display, is it an art installation? He's kind of constantly questioning that sense of value.'

And in another series, called Banality, Koons crossed that fine line and actually bought advertising space for his work called Art Magazine Ads to fight back at the hostile views of his critics.

Harriet said: 'The art world, and everybody actually, have always had a love/hate relationship with Jeff Koons.

'Ask anybody what they think of Jeff Koons and they say they either love him or hate him. His work can be quite polarising but a lot of people are quite intrigued by it.

'In the 1980s in the editorial pages of art magazines such as Art in America or Artforum they were very critical of Jeff Koons... but he kind of inserted himself, he kind of countered that criticism by producing this artwork. They are adverts for his exhibition but they are also much more critical than that, in that they are tackling some of the criticisms that are being thrown at him.'

A second work coming to Norwich Castle from this series is Winter Bears, a cheap and cheerful looking sculpture which plays on the value of high art versus cheap kitsch because, like with many of his works, Koons actually employed master craftsmen to make it.

'There is something incredibly joyful about this (Winter Bears),' said Harriet.

'It's tacky but it's inviting. I think he means it when he says he wants art to appeal to everybody. He wants everybody to have an experience of art that can be meaningful. Why should art be inaccessible, and why should art not use iconography that everybody can understand?'

Koons himself takes centre stage in his series Made in Heaven, alongside his former wife, the adult film star Ilona Staller. Much of the work from this series is intimate, provocative and very explicit, but the pieces from the series on display at the castle are the beautifully crafted glass Mound of Flowers and also an elegant, Rococo, Late Baroque-inspired marble sculpture of the couple called Bourgeois Bust – Jeff and Ilona.

Harriet said: 'His wife is transformed into Venus, the goddess of love. I think he genuinely believes in the power of art to transform and to transform us as well. We can be enlightened and entertained.'

And as the finishing touches are now being made to the show, Harriet said she hoped lots of people would be entertained and enthralled by the exhibition.

She said: 'Koons says he wants to tell a story in his work that is easy for anyone to enter into and on some level enjoy, and what I would like to happen with this exhibition is for us to be able to tell that story effectively, for people to be inspired, entertained, questioned, and to see one of the world's most famous artists in Norfolk.'

ARTIST ROOMS: Jeff Koons is at Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery from May 9 until September 6. Tickets £6 (concessions £5, children £4). For more information visit www.nnfestival.org.uk

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