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Lot Essay
Statement from Jeff Koons, June 2022
I am deeply honored to have my artwork Balloon Monkey (Magenta) auctioned at Christie’s London, through the generous donation of Victor and Olena Pinchuk, to create humanitarian aid for the Ukrainian people. Victor and Olena Pinchuk have been working tirelessly to support Ukraine, so it is a sincere privilege to have my artwork be at the service of their extraordinary efforts to raise critical funds to support the Ukrainian people. Art’s true value is to be of service to humanity and there could not be a higher calling at this moment than to support the people of Ukraine.
Through my friendship with Victor and Olena Pinchuk, my life has been enriched by the people of Ukraine and its culture. I have had the opportunity to visit Ukraine numerous times by myself and with my family and have always felt a strong sense of community, friendship, and history. My series of Balloon Venus sculptures are in dialogue with prehistoric venus figurines I viewed in the collection of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine. For me, the sculptures engage with human history and the connectivity of art that spans the history of humankind.
One of the reasons that I have always worked with balloons is that that the membrane is a reference to our skin; it’s about both internal and external life. Balloon Monkey (Magenta) symbolizes hope, affirmation, and transcendence, so, for me, it is very fitting to have this sculpture engaged in this effort to support the Ukrainian people at this time in history.
I have been very saddened by the war and destruction that I have seen affecting the Ukrainian people and their culture and I can only hope that the donation of my artwork by Victor and Olena Pinchuk can help draw attention to the need for aid and support for the Ukrainian people, now more than ever.
***
A majestic vision seven years in the making, Balloon Monkey (Magenta) (2006-2013) sees Jeff Koons’s sculptural practice reach extraordinary new heights of formal splendour, technical achievement and sheer, awe-inspiring impact. Completed on the eve of the artist’s career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, its seductive form, monumental scale and reflective, opulently coloured surface—all precision-crafted to seemingly impossible levels of flawlessness and finish—capture the essence of his work, which probes the iconography of childhood innocence to expose the deep drives of desire and joy that animate our relationship with art. The present sculpture is the highly sought-after artist’s proof and one of five unique versions of Balloon Monkey, each formed of mirror-polished stainless steel with a transparent colour coating: the others are red, blue, yellow, and orange. They are the very largest of Koons’s balloon-animal works. Developing the vocabulary of the Celebration series—which included the artist’s first inflatable colossus, the iconic Balloon Dog (1994-2000)—Balloon Monkey (Magenta) arrives at an apex of glossy, weightless perfection. Sweeping six metres from head to tail and standing almost four metres high, it towers like a sphinx or totem, an ephemeral plaything transformed into a sublime, otherworldly object of worship.
The themes of air, breath and inflation have long been central to Koons’s practice. He began to explore blow-up objects as early as 1979 with his Inflatables, which found counterparts in the encased, fluorescently-lit vacuum cleaners he exhibited as The New the following year. The Equilibrium series of 1985 included basketballs suspended in tanks of water, and unnerving, weighty flotation devices made of bronze. His iconic stainless steel Rabbit, a direct ancestor to the twisted balloon animals, appeared in 1986; the Balloon Dog arrived as part of the large-scale Celebration series commenced in the early 1990s, which reimagined objects associated with milestones such as birthdays, Easter and Valentine’s Day. Alongside Balloon Swan (2004-2011) and Balloon Rabbit (2005-2010), Balloon Monkey represents an evolution of these works, developing their exuberant spirit and complex, confounding presence. Beyond their sensual play between lightness and weight, fragility and strength, Koons sees the inflatables as metaphors for the human condition. ‘I think it comes about just defining this balance of interior/exterior’, he explains. ‘You breathe in and you inflate. You pull the external realm into yourself, and you inflate. Breath is a symbol of life energy. When you exhale, it returns to the exterior, that’s a symbol of almost your last breath’ (J. Koons in conversation with X. Sturgis, in Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean, exh. cat. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 2019, p. 18).
That something so seemingly childish can speak to these grand, existential ideas is a revelation: Balloon Monkey (Magenta) is a confluence of the sublime and the ridiculous, transcending our every aesthetic assumption. Its very physical presence is hallucinogenic. As if by magic, the most fleeting of objects has become an immaculate, gleaming titan in several tons of stainless steel. This miraculous spectacle is the result of an extraordinary devotion to precision, purity and integrity. Working from an actual balloon monkey created by a specialist inflatable artist, Koons and his team of fabricators used bespoke white-light and CT scanning technologies to create a finely-tuned computerised model, before engaging in an intricate multi-step process of casting, three-dimensional milling, polishing and painting—involving much trial and error, and thousands of hours of work—in the pursuit of the final, faultless object. ‘For Koons,’ writes curator Scott Rothkopf, ‘this is a matter of earning his audience’s “trust”, which he prizes above all else: trust in the work, trust in its maker, and trust in the very idea and power of art … The asymmetry between his quotidian subjects and meticulous methodology is in large measure what makes his works so stupefying to contemplate, if riveting to behold … Their shrewd precision invokes in us the consuming wonder of a child before a toy, and also, at times, a sense of awe and even terror’ (S. Rothkopf, ‘No Limits’, in Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 2014, p. 31). In Balloon Monkey (Magenta), the seamless detail of each twist, pucker and swell lends the faux-balloon surface an astonishing verisimilitude. The sculpture’s taut skin seems ready to burst at a pinprick, and its torsions and tensions strain with a near-audible rubbery squeak.
Koons’s choice of the monkey comes freighted with art-historical meaning, and has precedent in his own work. In his sculpture Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988)—a gold-and-white porcelain incarnation of the King of Pop, who Koons said at the time was the one other living person he would wish to be—Jackson’s pet chimp, cradled in his owner’s lap, took the place of the infant Jesus in a tableau that recalled the traditional image of Madonna and Child. As our closest living relatives, apes and monkeys have long been used to subvert, question or poke fun at the pretensions of the human world. The genre of singerie, at its height of popularity in 18th century France, saw monkeys dressed in clothes, mimicking or intervening in people’s affairs, and even—as in Jean-Baptiste Chardin’s The Monkey Painter (1739-40)—taking the position of the artist. In Nature Morte: Portrait of Cézanne/Portrait of Renoir/Portrait of Rembrandt (1920), Francis Picabia ridiculed the great art of the past with the image of a stuffed toy monkey: a gesture that Koons has cited as an inspiration for his work, which, with its surreal use of the ‘readymade’, shares much of Picabia’s Dadaist spirit. More recently, the British graffiti artist Banksy has used apes to similarly satirical ends in works such as Devolved Parliament (2009), which depicts the House of Commons filled with chimpanzees. In Balloon Monkey (Magenta), the surface’s mirror-polish brings the spectator’s own image into the work. While Koons sees this involvement of the viewer as affirming and uplifting, it also means that—like visitors to a zoo—while we gaze at the monkey, the monkey gazes back at us.
With its pyramidal structure and swooping, cantilevered tail, Balloon Monkey (Magenta) can be seen as an abstract, almost architectural presence. Its clean lines and space-age geometries recall the work of Constantin Brâncuși, the father of modernist sculpture. Its form contains multiple layers of abstraction, from monkey to balloon representation to monument, as if distilled from reality to a metaphysical ideal. Koons strives for a sense of ‘objectivity’ and universality through the pure, hyper-polished facture of his works, which appear never to have been touched by mortal hands. In doing so, he uncovers something of the erotic charge that lies at the heart of our sensual interactions with the world. The monkey’s swelling, phallic tail and orifical creases and curves are not incidental: like the lingam and yoni statues of ancient Hindu tradition, it invokes both masculine and feminine aspects of sexuality. Koons encourages the viewer to embrace and enjoy these elements of life without guilt, returning to a state of prelapsarian wonder. ‘My art has always used sex as a direct communication line to the viewer’, he says. ‘The surface of my stainless steel pieces is pure sex and gives an object both a masculine and a feminine side: the weight of the steel engages with the femininity of the reflective surface’ (J. Koons, quoted in Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean, ibid., p. 37).
Andy Warhol famously claimed that if anybody wanted to know all about him, they should ‘just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it’ (A. Warhol, quoted in G. Berg, ‘Andy: My True Story’, The East Village Other, November 1, 1966, p. 9). In Balloon Dog (Magenta), Koons performs a different vanishing trick. The candy-coloured surface reflects and abstracts only the viewer and their surroundings, and the artist seems to have disappeared entirely. It is a masterpiece of paradoxical power, its contradictions bouncing off it like light: mind-bending complexity and total simplicity; seriousness and play; innocence and eroticism; popular consumerism and our deepest, most primal structures of myth and belief. It is an object free of irony, created with near-unimaginable dedication, and presented as an expression of trust, openness, sincerity and love. It represents something that is bigger than us, yet part of us all. For all its surface tension and imposing, even overwhelming presence, the sculpture contains and holds the viewer in its mercurial façade, inviting them—like Alice through the looking glass—into a world of freedom and imagination. For Koons, the Balloon Monkey is a profound and buoyant affirmation that art is not only what we see, but what happens inside us.
I am deeply honored to have my artwork Balloon Monkey (Magenta) auctioned at Christie’s London, through the generous donation of Victor and Olena Pinchuk, to create humanitarian aid for the Ukrainian people. Victor and Olena Pinchuk have been working tirelessly to support Ukraine, so it is a sincere privilege to have my artwork be at the service of their extraordinary efforts to raise critical funds to support the Ukrainian people. Art’s true value is to be of service to humanity and there could not be a higher calling at this moment than to support the people of Ukraine.
Through my friendship with Victor and Olena Pinchuk, my life has been enriched by the people of Ukraine and its culture. I have had the opportunity to visit Ukraine numerous times by myself and with my family and have always felt a strong sense of community, friendship, and history. My series of Balloon Venus sculptures are in dialogue with prehistoric venus figurines I viewed in the collection of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine. For me, the sculptures engage with human history and the connectivity of art that spans the history of humankind.
One of the reasons that I have always worked with balloons is that that the membrane is a reference to our skin; it’s about both internal and external life. Balloon Monkey (Magenta) symbolizes hope, affirmation, and transcendence, so, for me, it is very fitting to have this sculpture engaged in this effort to support the Ukrainian people at this time in history.
I have been very saddened by the war and destruction that I have seen affecting the Ukrainian people and their culture and I can only hope that the donation of my artwork by Victor and Olena Pinchuk can help draw attention to the need for aid and support for the Ukrainian people, now more than ever.
***
A majestic vision seven years in the making, Balloon Monkey (Magenta) (2006-2013) sees Jeff Koons’s sculptural practice reach extraordinary new heights of formal splendour, technical achievement and sheer, awe-inspiring impact. Completed on the eve of the artist’s career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, its seductive form, monumental scale and reflective, opulently coloured surface—all precision-crafted to seemingly impossible levels of flawlessness and finish—capture the essence of his work, which probes the iconography of childhood innocence to expose the deep drives of desire and joy that animate our relationship with art. The present sculpture is the highly sought-after artist’s proof and one of five unique versions of Balloon Monkey, each formed of mirror-polished stainless steel with a transparent colour coating: the others are red, blue, yellow, and orange. They are the very largest of Koons’s balloon-animal works. Developing the vocabulary of the Celebration series—which included the artist’s first inflatable colossus, the iconic Balloon Dog (1994-2000)—Balloon Monkey (Magenta) arrives at an apex of glossy, weightless perfection. Sweeping six metres from head to tail and standing almost four metres high, it towers like a sphinx or totem, an ephemeral plaything transformed into a sublime, otherworldly object of worship.
The themes of air, breath and inflation have long been central to Koons’s practice. He began to explore blow-up objects as early as 1979 with his Inflatables, which found counterparts in the encased, fluorescently-lit vacuum cleaners he exhibited as The New the following year. The Equilibrium series of 1985 included basketballs suspended in tanks of water, and unnerving, weighty flotation devices made of bronze. His iconic stainless steel Rabbit, a direct ancestor to the twisted balloon animals, appeared in 1986; the Balloon Dog arrived as part of the large-scale Celebration series commenced in the early 1990s, which reimagined objects associated with milestones such as birthdays, Easter and Valentine’s Day. Alongside Balloon Swan (2004-2011) and Balloon Rabbit (2005-2010), Balloon Monkey represents an evolution of these works, developing their exuberant spirit and complex, confounding presence. Beyond their sensual play between lightness and weight, fragility and strength, Koons sees the inflatables as metaphors for the human condition. ‘I think it comes about just defining this balance of interior/exterior’, he explains. ‘You breathe in and you inflate. You pull the external realm into yourself, and you inflate. Breath is a symbol of life energy. When you exhale, it returns to the exterior, that’s a symbol of almost your last breath’ (J. Koons in conversation with X. Sturgis, in Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean, exh. cat. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 2019, p. 18).
That something so seemingly childish can speak to these grand, existential ideas is a revelation: Balloon Monkey (Magenta) is a confluence of the sublime and the ridiculous, transcending our every aesthetic assumption. Its very physical presence is hallucinogenic. As if by magic, the most fleeting of objects has become an immaculate, gleaming titan in several tons of stainless steel. This miraculous spectacle is the result of an extraordinary devotion to precision, purity and integrity. Working from an actual balloon monkey created by a specialist inflatable artist, Koons and his team of fabricators used bespoke white-light and CT scanning technologies to create a finely-tuned computerised model, before engaging in an intricate multi-step process of casting, three-dimensional milling, polishing and painting—involving much trial and error, and thousands of hours of work—in the pursuit of the final, faultless object. ‘For Koons,’ writes curator Scott Rothkopf, ‘this is a matter of earning his audience’s “trust”, which he prizes above all else: trust in the work, trust in its maker, and trust in the very idea and power of art … The asymmetry between his quotidian subjects and meticulous methodology is in large measure what makes his works so stupefying to contemplate, if riveting to behold … Their shrewd precision invokes in us the consuming wonder of a child before a toy, and also, at times, a sense of awe and even terror’ (S. Rothkopf, ‘No Limits’, in Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 2014, p. 31). In Balloon Monkey (Magenta), the seamless detail of each twist, pucker and swell lends the faux-balloon surface an astonishing verisimilitude. The sculpture’s taut skin seems ready to burst at a pinprick, and its torsions and tensions strain with a near-audible rubbery squeak.
Koons’s choice of the monkey comes freighted with art-historical meaning, and has precedent in his own work. In his sculpture Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988)—a gold-and-white porcelain incarnation of the King of Pop, who Koons said at the time was the one other living person he would wish to be—Jackson’s pet chimp, cradled in his owner’s lap, took the place of the infant Jesus in a tableau that recalled the traditional image of Madonna and Child. As our closest living relatives, apes and monkeys have long been used to subvert, question or poke fun at the pretensions of the human world. The genre of singerie, at its height of popularity in 18th century France, saw monkeys dressed in clothes, mimicking or intervening in people’s affairs, and even—as in Jean-Baptiste Chardin’s The Monkey Painter (1739-40)—taking the position of the artist. In Nature Morte: Portrait of Cézanne/Portrait of Renoir/Portrait of Rembrandt (1920), Francis Picabia ridiculed the great art of the past with the image of a stuffed toy monkey: a gesture that Koons has cited as an inspiration for his work, which, with its surreal use of the ‘readymade’, shares much of Picabia’s Dadaist spirit. More recently, the British graffiti artist Banksy has used apes to similarly satirical ends in works such as Devolved Parliament (2009), which depicts the House of Commons filled with chimpanzees. In Balloon Monkey (Magenta), the surface’s mirror-polish brings the spectator’s own image into the work. While Koons sees this involvement of the viewer as affirming and uplifting, it also means that—like visitors to a zoo—while we gaze at the monkey, the monkey gazes back at us.
With its pyramidal structure and swooping, cantilevered tail, Balloon Monkey (Magenta) can be seen as an abstract, almost architectural presence. Its clean lines and space-age geometries recall the work of Constantin Brâncuși, the father of modernist sculpture. Its form contains multiple layers of abstraction, from monkey to balloon representation to monument, as if distilled from reality to a metaphysical ideal. Koons strives for a sense of ‘objectivity’ and universality through the pure, hyper-polished facture of his works, which appear never to have been touched by mortal hands. In doing so, he uncovers something of the erotic charge that lies at the heart of our sensual interactions with the world. The monkey’s swelling, phallic tail and orifical creases and curves are not incidental: like the lingam and yoni statues of ancient Hindu tradition, it invokes both masculine and feminine aspects of sexuality. Koons encourages the viewer to embrace and enjoy these elements of life without guilt, returning to a state of prelapsarian wonder. ‘My art has always used sex as a direct communication line to the viewer’, he says. ‘The surface of my stainless steel pieces is pure sex and gives an object both a masculine and a feminine side: the weight of the steel engages with the femininity of the reflective surface’ (J. Koons, quoted in Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean, ibid., p. 37).
Andy Warhol famously claimed that if anybody wanted to know all about him, they should ‘just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it’ (A. Warhol, quoted in G. Berg, ‘Andy: My True Story’, The East Village Other, November 1, 1966, p. 9). In Balloon Dog (Magenta), Koons performs a different vanishing trick. The candy-coloured surface reflects and abstracts only the viewer and their surroundings, and the artist seems to have disappeared entirely. It is a masterpiece of paradoxical power, its contradictions bouncing off it like light: mind-bending complexity and total simplicity; seriousness and play; innocence and eroticism; popular consumerism and our deepest, most primal structures of myth and belief. It is an object free of irony, created with near-unimaginable dedication, and presented as an expression of trust, openness, sincerity and love. It represents something that is bigger than us, yet part of us all. For all its surface tension and imposing, even overwhelming presence, the sculpture contains and holds the viewer in its mercurial façade, inviting them—like Alice through the looking glass—into a world of freedom and imagination. For Koons, the Balloon Monkey is a profound and buoyant affirmation that art is not only what we see, but what happens inside us.