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Lot Essay
Epic in scale and mesmerizing with its brilliant blasts of red and yellow across its dazzling surface, Plate Set is one of the iconic images from Jeff Koons' seminal Celebration series. Housed within the same important private collection since its creation, the painting was at the heart of the artist's landmark exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel in 2012, curated as a perfect counterpoint to the artist's highly-polished, sculptural masterpiece, Tulips, from the same series. Blown up to amazing proportions, Plate Set offers a tantalizing view onto a party table; the plastic knife, spoon and fork placed with precision alongside an empty plate onto a glistening foil tablecloth, each artificial surface rendered with awe-inspiring perfection and spellbinding sensitivity. It is larger than life itself. With the party yet to begin, the painting projects the excitement and happy anticipation a young child might feel before their birthday. We as adults are invited to cast an eye from above and to once again enjoy the most simple of pleasures: to marvel at the play of light from reflective foil, the hallucinatory qualities of perfected shapes and clean, seductive lines. In Plate Set, Koons has achieved a startling photorealism, each object almost tangible through the meticulous handling of paint and painstaking verisimilitude. The vibrant palette near-leaps from the painting; a celebration of color like a fresh pack of crayons. As Koons has explained: "the way I've tried to treat color in Celebration, it's just as simple as a pack of Crayola. You have red, you have blue, you have green, yellow, pink. And that's it. The colour is bright, it's fresh, and it's direct" (J. Koons, quoted in H. Werner Holzwarth (ed.), Jeff Koons, Cologne, 2009, p. 400).
In creating the Celebration series, Koons was embracing the wonderment, blissful naivety and freedom of childhood, conjuring up those pre-lapsarian days in each work of art. From the party hat, to the slice of heavily-iced cake, to the twisted balloons rendered in mirror-polished steel in its palette of brilliant colors, Koons was offering a grown-up audience the opportunity to revel in childhood memories. Just as the colossal, inflatable Balloon Flowers and Balloon Dog impel us to touch, so the intense scale of Plate Set leaves us to look on with wide-eyed amazement and childlike awe. As the artist has elaborated, "I don't think about Celebration as being specifically about childhood. I think that they are ageless images They relate to aspects of childhood. A child looking at it could be engaged by it. But they are things that are, hopefully, important to people in general. They are dealing with aspects which people can think back to about childhood, and to memory" (J. Koons, quoted in S. Keller (ed.), Jeff Koons, exh. cat., Fondation Beyeler, 2012, p. 158). Together, the Celebration works reflect the full cycle of life, articulated through a calendar of images that recall the events of the year: Easter Eggs, ribbons from gifts, children's parties, balloon sculptures, Valentine's Day hearts. These tropes mark out so much of the year, and yet also provide a microcosm of life itself, with birth, death, anniversaries, romance and reproduction charting the passage of time.
For Koons, the Celebration series was also a deeply personal tribute and emotional anchor to his young son, whose celebrations and annual milestones the artist was, for a time, unable to share. "My son was born in October 1992" Koons recalled. "Immediately I became interested in a lot of images I came across, the packaging of toys, a playful rabbit--things that I enjoyed again. I had used a lot of these images in the past. I started the Celebration series without a title. My son used to come into the studio while I was working on Hanging Heart. So the work fell into an area where I felt that I wanted my son to feel how much I was thinking of him" (J. Koons, quoted in T. Kellein (ed.), Jeff Koons: Pictures 1980-2002, exh. cat., Bielefeld, 2002, p. 28).
In Plate Set, Koons also engages with the long legacy of art history. Indeed in the conception and realization of his work, Koons created miniature set-ups much like the Old Masters, photographing the arrangement of objects against foil backgrounds, later to project them onto canvas to create the clean-edged, superreal, 'coloring book' quality of the final composition. The 'directness' Koons favors in his painting draws equally from his admiration of Pop Art, in particular Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, whose proud championing and satirizing of popular culture had such an impact on him. As Koons himself has averred, "my works are very 'Pop'. Each time I look at Pop Art it's like a little explosion, very upbeat. I hope that my works, too, have that kind of rejuvenation, that each time you look at it you feel a sense of pop" (J. Koons, quoted in S. Keller (ed.), Jeff Koons, exh. cat., Fondation Beyeler, 2012, p. 144). In Plate Set with its neat concentric circles of cups, plates and saucers, we cannot but recognise Koons's nod to Jasper Johns and his predecessor's Target paintings rendered in bright primaries of red, yellow and blue. In Plate Set however, the sensuality of Johns' paint surface gives way to the superreal perfection of Koons' canvas, the mesmerizing gloss of color recalling the sublime reflections of the artist's spectacular, mirrored sculptures.
In creating the Celebration series, Koons was embracing the wonderment, blissful naivety and freedom of childhood, conjuring up those pre-lapsarian days in each work of art. From the party hat, to the slice of heavily-iced cake, to the twisted balloons rendered in mirror-polished steel in its palette of brilliant colors, Koons was offering a grown-up audience the opportunity to revel in childhood memories. Just as the colossal, inflatable Balloon Flowers and Balloon Dog impel us to touch, so the intense scale of Plate Set leaves us to look on with wide-eyed amazement and childlike awe. As the artist has elaborated, "I don't think about Celebration as being specifically about childhood. I think that they are ageless images They relate to aspects of childhood. A child looking at it could be engaged by it. But they are things that are, hopefully, important to people in general. They are dealing with aspects which people can think back to about childhood, and to memory" (J. Koons, quoted in S. Keller (ed.), Jeff Koons, exh. cat., Fondation Beyeler, 2012, p. 158). Together, the Celebration works reflect the full cycle of life, articulated through a calendar of images that recall the events of the year: Easter Eggs, ribbons from gifts, children's parties, balloon sculptures, Valentine's Day hearts. These tropes mark out so much of the year, and yet also provide a microcosm of life itself, with birth, death, anniversaries, romance and reproduction charting the passage of time.
For Koons, the Celebration series was also a deeply personal tribute and emotional anchor to his young son, whose celebrations and annual milestones the artist was, for a time, unable to share. "My son was born in October 1992" Koons recalled. "Immediately I became interested in a lot of images I came across, the packaging of toys, a playful rabbit--things that I enjoyed again. I had used a lot of these images in the past. I started the Celebration series without a title. My son used to come into the studio while I was working on Hanging Heart. So the work fell into an area where I felt that I wanted my son to feel how much I was thinking of him" (J. Koons, quoted in T. Kellein (ed.), Jeff Koons: Pictures 1980-2002, exh. cat., Bielefeld, 2002, p. 28).
In Plate Set, Koons also engages with the long legacy of art history. Indeed in the conception and realization of his work, Koons created miniature set-ups much like the Old Masters, photographing the arrangement of objects against foil backgrounds, later to project them onto canvas to create the clean-edged, superreal, 'coloring book' quality of the final composition. The 'directness' Koons favors in his painting draws equally from his admiration of Pop Art, in particular Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, whose proud championing and satirizing of popular culture had such an impact on him. As Koons himself has averred, "my works are very 'Pop'. Each time I look at Pop Art it's like a little explosion, very upbeat. I hope that my works, too, have that kind of rejuvenation, that each time you look at it you feel a sense of pop" (J. Koons, quoted in S. Keller (ed.), Jeff Koons, exh. cat., Fondation Beyeler, 2012, p. 144). In Plate Set with its neat concentric circles of cups, plates and saucers, we cannot but recognise Koons's nod to Jasper Johns and his predecessor's Target paintings rendered in bright primaries of red, yellow and blue. In Plate Set however, the sensuality of Johns' paint surface gives way to the superreal perfection of Koons' canvas, the mesmerizing gloss of color recalling the sublime reflections of the artist's spectacular, mirrored sculptures.