Jeff Koons in Qatar: The American Artist’s Lost in America Exhibition Is One Not To Be Missed…
On now until March 31, the exhibition finds purpose in opening us up to the vastness of experience
There’s a defiant exuberance in the air as one enters Al Riwaq to explore Lost in America; the blockbuster new exhibition from Jeff Koons, one of the world’s best known and most influential contemporary artists. It’s a palpable feeling of excitement, discovery, and novelty; marking a kind of return to childhood and the openness and lack of judgement that comes with it. Towering sculptures and dizzying colours dwarf us, the viewers, and present a lively curatorial experience that is grounded in both intellectualism and feeling.
Featuring more than sixty artworks drawn from Jeff Koons’ four-decades-long career, divided into 16 galleries, the exhibition is conceived as an expansive self-portrait, presenting American culture as seen through the autobiographical lens of the artist.
“My work embraces the everyday, it celebrates colour and life’s energy,” Jeff explains Koons. “The exhibition is almost a hallucinogenic autobiography of growing up in the United States, the different colours and the scale of different objects.”
Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, and marking Koons’ first exhibition in the Gulf region, Lost in America showcases some of the artist’s best-known works from series such as The New (1980 -87), Banality (1988), Celebration (1994–), Popeye (2002–13) and Antiquity (2008–), alongside more recent works that are shown for the first time during the exhibition.
“My interest in American culture derives from being an American. I was born in 1955 there was an idea of exploring, everybody was having automobiles and taking vacations and we had colour television and so there was a tremendous amount of information through the media that I was able to absorb and interact with. This celebration of the external world has been really important to my work.”
In many of his works, everyday objects and industrial materials take on new meaning – retrieved from the realms of the mundane and transformed into artworks that speak of hope, the self and transcendence. “There are aspects of the body of work that come off as everyday but are presented in kind of mythic form; a quality that makes you look at them again and find tremendous beauty in things that are simple,” he says.
Whether that be a hoover encased in glass, or a towering balloon dog, Koons places the aside centre stage. “I started to work with everyday objects as a way of showing that everything is perfect in its own being,” he tells Bazaar. “The objects are metaphors for people. We don’t really care about inanimate objects – they capture an essence of our history, and provide us with information that we can pass onto future generations – but what we truly care about is life itself and each other and how to be able to make life a vaster experience.”
“You think about how to make experience more meaningful; how you can be as generous as possible with experience.”
Jeff Koons
That development of experience – where it can take us and what it can make us feel – is tied to the multi-disciplinary quality of art. “I started drawing, painting, being involved with the dialogue of making art as a child but I really didn’t become aware of art’s power to unite all the different disciplines until I was in college,” he acknowledges. “It was there that I realised that art was referencing philosophy and sociology and physics and aesthetics—all the disciplines, effortlessly connected. It was mind-blowing for me. I realised I could be involved in all of the human disciplines and, in realising that, I wanted to be involved in art that could communicate to people. You don’t have to bring anything to an interaction with art other than yourself. Everything about you is perfect and it’s about that moment and the dialogue you experience.”
That sense of acceptance manifests itself in Play-Doh (1994–2014), an aptly-titled artwork resembling a mound of the modelling compound. The idea for the piece was inspired by one of Koons’ children creating a mound of Play-Doh at home. “His arms were spread and he had a big smile on his face,” recalls the artist, “and I looked at the Play-Doh and I realised that it was perfect. How could you make any judgement about it? I’ve always tried to have a dialogue with my work that is about the removal of judgment. We could be looking at an object, like a mound of Play-Doh, and asking ourselves ‘is it a good mound, is it a bad mound?’ It’s a mound. It can’t be anything other than that and in its own being, it is perfect.”
The global pandemic provided Koons with the space in which to continue to explore the value of experience. “All experience effects and changes your being,” he says. “During lockdown, I enjoyed so much the intimacy I was able to have with my family and friends, the opportunity to get to know my children even better. You think about your position within the world, how to make experience more meaningful; how you can be as generous as possible with experience.”
That generosity is a key tenet of much of Koons’ mirrored works. “I’ve always enjoyed working with reflective surfaces,” he says, “because it reflects you, the viewer and it affirms your existence and so the art really lies in the essence of your own potential. Some of the sculptures are reflecting in 360 degrees and they are really being as generous as possible to you the viewer, telling you everything they can about where you are in the universe in that moment.”
That sense of being, of experience, is a fundamental part of Lost in America. “What I realised happened to me as a human being is that I love art and I love the feelings that it generates,” Koons continues. “When you interact with something you feel sensations and those sensations then form ideas. I love that interaction, the intensity of that, and I would create works of art that would help generate those feelings.
Automatically, I started to think more about the viewer, where I wanted to be in communication with them and to share more information with them. I like to think of it almost as a hunter analogy. If you’re living in a hunting society and you go out and bring home a rabbit, it’s enough for you to eat and your needs are met, but at a certain point you get more pleasure in going out and hunting mammal and bringing home something that can feed the whole community and that’s what has happened to me as an artist.”
Here in Qatar, that community of viewers is certainly being satiated. “I’ve been in dialogue with Doha and the Royal family for many years,” he says. “From the first time I came to Doha, we’ve spoken about doing things – making a large scale sculpture or doing an exhibition. I’m so happy that this exhibition has been realised as I have enjoyed so much the cultural interaction. I’m also thrilled that at the moment there is a celebration of cultural exchange between Qatar and the United States as part of the Year of Culture.”
With such a prolific body of work produced over his career, how did the artist and his curator go about selecting artworks to include? “It’s a process,” says Koons, “a bit like making a string of popcorn with a thread. It’s about making inner relationships. Certain exhibitions will put together certain works or certain narratives and it changes and this just seemed, for the scale of the galleries that are here and the opportunity that we had to show at Al Riwaq, the most appropriate body of works.”
“The way the exhibition is presented is about my autobiographical past as an American but at the end of the day, the discussion is really what does it mean to be human. We’re surrounded by everything and if we really want to have a vast life, we need to open ourselves up to everything. That’s empowerment. Everything is here at our disposal and it is up to us to open ourselves up to it.”
How important is it that viewers come to the exhibition with an open mind? “Wonderful if they do, but if they don’t, that’s fine too,” he says. “The work is trying to make people feel disarmed and comfortable in opening themselves up to life experience. On the way to Al Riwaq, I passed a sculpture on the corniche – an oyster shell with a pearl inside it – and that’s how we are as people. The more we are able to open up to life experience, the more we are able to interact and be in communication with life.”
Until 31 March 2022, Qatar Museums Gallery, Al Riwaq
All Image credits: All imagery courtesy of Qatar Museums, 2022 © Jeff Koons
From Harper’s Bazaar Qatar’s Spring 2022 issue.