Executed in 1991, this work is number 3 from an edition of 3 and one artist proof. PROVENANCE
Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Acquired by the present owner from the above
EXHIBITED
New York, Sonnabend Gallery; Cologne, Galerie Max Hetzler, Made in Heaven, 1991 (another example)
New York, Gagosian Gallery, Jeff Koons Andy Warhol: Flowers, November - December 2002, pp. 22-23, illustrated in color and pp. 20-21 (illustration in color of installation at Gagosian Gallery, New York)
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES
Exh. Cat., Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum [and traveling], Jeff Koons, 1992, p. 83, illustrated in color (another example)
Exh. Cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [and traveling], Jeff Koons, 1992, cat. no. 67, pl. no. 53, illustrated in color (another example)
Robert Rosenblum and Jeff Koons, Jeff Koons Handbook, London, 1992, illustrated in color
A. Muthesius, Jeff Koons, Cologne, 1992, pl. no. 21, p. 140, illustrated in color and p. 141 (illustration in color of installation at Galerie Max Hetzler, Cologne)
Hildegund Amanshauser, "Pornographic Scenes of a Normal Married Life," Camera Austria, May 1992, p. 44, illustrated in color
Exh. Cat., Paris, Galerie Jerome de Noirmont, Jeff Koons, 1997, n.p., illustrated in color (another example)
CATALOGUE NOTE
As a metaphor for female sexuality, for the human life cycle, and as a symbol of growth and beauty, flowers have played an important role for numerous artists over the course of art history. From his earliest inflatable works to his more recent large-scale outdoor sculptures such as Puppy (1992) and Balloon Flower (1997), floral motifs have been a recurring subject for Jeff Koons. They are scattered about the base of Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), and a number of his other Banality sculptures, and they figure prominently in a number of works that Jeff Koons grouped together with the fateful title Made in Heaven.
In 1989 a New York City billboard on Broadway was unveiled as Jeff Koons’ contribution to the Whitney Museum’s Image World exhibition. The large image is one that seems to advertise a film entitled "Made In Heaven," starring the famous young artist and the famous Italian porn star Ciccolina. The artist is naked, the porn star is dressed in lacy white underwear. They lie together on a large bronze rock-like form, a commercially illustrated wind mural swoops into the composition all around them. The image is part Harlequin Romance Novel cover and pure post-modern irony at its best. It recalls many canonized images stored in our collective pop-culture memory bank; yet, it is strikingly different and it appears in a different context from those things to which it refers. The poster teases. It reveals very little about the meaning or content of the mysterious project it serves to illustrate and promote, Made in Heaven, and it ultimately leaves its viewer with more questions than answers.
Two years later, in 1991, Jeff Koons’ Made in Heaven exhibition opened simultaneously in New York and Cologne, and the expectations were incredibly high for the seemingly unstoppable artist. His previous show, Banality, had been his most critically and commercially successful one to date, and it had been three years since Koons had exhibited in a commercial gallery. The billboard, along with a sampling of works from the Made in Heaven series shown at the Venice Biennale in 1990, had left people wanting more, and now, finally, Koons gave his audience, as always, that which they most desired. In his most daring and self-implicating move yet, Koons delivered his most controversial body of work.
Made in Heaven presented an ambitious and highly varied number of new works in two and three dimensions. Starring Koons and La Ciccolina (the couple were now married) as promised in the billboard, large photographically produced paintings and life-size sculptures showed the stars engaged in various sexual positions. A number of sculptural works in wood, marble and glass rounded out the show balancing blatant sexual content with demure suggestiveness. The show and the body of work itself marked a turning point for Koons: a shift towards the personal and autobiographical, a full embrace of spectacle, and a natural historical adjustment from the eighties into the nineties.
One work from the series, Mound of Flowers is an organic liquid bouquet of glass petals and leaves. It comfortably situates itself, as to be expected from Koons, on the border between high and low, a tribute at once to kitsch and to Baroque and Rococo decorative motif. It borrows from the typical kitsch vernacular of ornamental glass, but heightens and stretches the form to unprecedented levels. In reference to the work, Koons explains, ``I am trying to capture the individual’s desire in the object, and to fix his or her aspirations in the surface, in a condition of immortality.’’ (Exh. Cat., Paris, Galerie Jean de Noirmont, Jeff Koons, 1997, n.p.)
Koons’ words touch on themes of desire, surface and immortality, themes that can be seen in all of his work that leads up to this point. They are themes that figure prevalently in Mound of Flowers. Koons immaculately infuses this work with desire, using the work’s surface, and contrasting ideas about beauty and the grotesque, as his raw material. Mound of Flowers performs for its audience like any great spectacle: it evokes both positive and negative reactions that ultimately add up to a very engaging event. Its surface glistens and shines, appearing to be wet and begging to be touched. Each flower is open, asking to be gazed upon, ultimately suggestive of sexual entry. Simultaneous to its functioning as a mound of seduction, the work operates within another realm of desire: the grotesque. Its surface is so shiny that light itself reflects off of it, its brilliant colors are jarringly saturated.