JEFF KOON’S TULIPS BRINGS A FLOOD OF COLOR TO OPEN AIR TERRACE AT THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM BILBAO

The exuberant five-meter-plus polychrome steel sculpture coexists peacefully with other site-specific works in the Museum’s Collection.

From 11 May on, Tulips, 1995-2004, by Jeff Koons (York, Pennsylvania, USA, 1955), acquired in 2006 to enhance the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection, will be sharing the outdoor site-specific stage with Yves Klein’s Fire Fountain (1960–61), Fujiko Nakaya’s Fog Sculpture # 08025 (F.O.G.) from 1998 and Maman (1999) by Louise Bourgeois. Tulips is to be permanently installed at one end of the terrace, along the Museum’s riverside façade.

By the author of the much-loved Puppy (1992), the Museum’s latest acquisition is a high chrome content stainless steel sculpture with a transparent color coating, shaped in the form of a bunch of seven tulips more than five meters long (203 x 460 x 520 cm). Conceived as vast balloons of luminescent color, Tulips  creates a sensation of weightlessness that is in sharp contrast to the heavy medium used to bolster the irony informing the work. Its artificial look captures to perfection the themes dealt with by Koons in his Celebration series, of which this work is part.

In purely formal terms, the sculpture is, to date, the most complex of its kind. The flower forms are placed horizontally to the ground, their long stems languidly intertwining. The work’s formal vocabulary combines the precision-point accuracy of Minimalist sculpture with the more day-to-day content of Pop Art.

But more than any other historical or artistic association, the sculpture displays a remarkable similarity (in terms of size and shape) to the enormous blow-ups so typical of US parades and which, over the years, have inspired Koons to create a number of artworks.

Completed in March 2007, the latest arrival to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection is number four of a series of five. One of the other four Tulips  is installed at the Norddeutsche Landesbank HQ in Hannover, Germany; another two are in prestigious collections, in this case the Prada Foundation in Milan and the Broad Foundation in Santa Monica, California. The other is in the artist’s own collection.

 

Celebration  series

After ten years’ work, Jeff Koons’ Celebration series is shaping up as the most ambitious set of artworks of his career. Comprising paintings of a meticulous photo-realism and sculptures of fun iconography, the series signals a radical change from Made in Heaven, 1989-1991, the series that preceded it. The enormous balloon-sculptures in Celebration are like toys and objects taken from a child’s birthday party, ranging from dogs, balloon moons and hats to plasticine, kitsch trinkets and artificial flowers.

More than ten times larger than life size, these fun objects could have been taken from some imaginary Wonderland, thereby extending the populist conception that lies behind Puppy.

As Koons himself has said, these works “are party pieces related to childhood, color and simplicity.” They illustrate quite beautifully the artist’s ability to transform something banal into a seductive object that questions art’s function in the consumer culture, just like other famed works of his, such as Rabbit, 1986, Balloon Dog, 1995 (both of which were on display at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao as part of Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Art in the Broad Collections held back in 2003) or Balloon Flower from 1997.

The sheer size, impeccable detail and surface finish, all achieved by the artist after years of experimentation and hard work, make Tulips  the most complex of the entire series from the point of view of finish and technique. Each individual flower has a brilliant glossy finish that reflects a colored light where seven stems weave and intersect; besides conjuring up the brilliant colors of children’s birthday parties or Easter baskets, this optical effect also evokes the visual experiments of OpArt and of the Art and Light movement.

Although Koons clearly continues here with his interest in popular culture and kitsch, Tulips also reveals his commitment to sculptural perfection and the still life. As in some of the artist’s previous works, irony and sincerity coexist with a clear-headed critical sense. The playful or celebratory spirit these works convey is effectively countered by the polished industrial perfection of their mirror-like finish.

Created on a scale designed to flaunt their superfluity, these giants, for all their banality, still come across as objects of desire, masking as they do the importance of the rituals with which they are associated. At the same time, Koons’ work in general is noted for the artist’s deeply held belief in the power of these objects to convey a collective cultural psyche that rejoices and finds consolation in ritual acts.