I just loved this adorable elephant on display last year at the Jeff Koons exhibit at the old Whitney Museum. This just makes you smile, doesn't it ? It is actually made of stainless steel which is pretty amazing!
This location of the old Whitney is now to be the MET Breuer, opening weekend is March 18-20, 2016. I cannot wait to see the new space for the MET, I am sure it's going to be pretty fabulous!
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NEW YORK, August 18, 2014—In response to the popularity of Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, the Whitney Museum of American Art will expand its operations to six days per week by opening on Mondays from 11 am–6 pm starting on September 1, 2014 (Labor Day). The Museum has already extended its Friday hours, opening at 11 am, two hours earlier than usual. The new schedule will continue for the duration of the exhibition, which will close on October 19.
“Lucid, challenging, brilliantly installed,” according to The New York Times, Jeff Koons: A Retrospective is the most comprehensive exhibition ever devoted to the artist’s groundbreaking work. By reconstituting all of his most iconic pieces and significant series in a chronological narrative, the retrospective allows visitors to understand Koons’s remarkably diverse output as a multifaceted whole. This also marks the artist’s first major museum presentation in New York, and the first time nearly the entirety of the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer building has been filled with a single artist’s work. It will also be the final exhibition to take place there before the Museum opens its new building in the Meatpacking District in spring 2015.
Additionally, three exhibitions featuring the Museum’s permanent collection are currently on view in the fifth floor and fifth-floor mezzanine galleries: Shaping A Collection: Five Decades of Gifts honors benefactors who were instrumental in expanding the Whitney’s collection and includes works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Agnes Martin, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol; Edward Hopper and Photography pairs Hopper paintings from the Whitney’s collection with works by six contemporary photographers—Gregory Crewdson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, William Eggleston, Steve Fitch, Todd Hido, and Stephen Shore; and Collecting Calder presents a selection of Alexander Calder sculptures and drawings.
ABOUT THE WHITNEY
Founded in 1930, the Whitney Museum of American Art is the world’s leading museum of twentieth-century and contemporary art of the United States. In addition to its landmark exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial, the Museum is known internationally for events and educational programs of exceptional significance and as a center for research, scholarship, and conservation. While its vibrant roster of exhibitions and events continues uptown in the Museum’s current home at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, the Whitney is in the process of constructing a new building, designed by Renzo Piano, in downtown Manhattan. Ground was broken in May 2011, and the Whitney’s new home is projected to open to the public in spring 2015.
Museum hours (effective September 1) are: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday from 11 am to 6 pm, Friday from 11 am to 9 pm, closed Tuesday. General admission: $20. Full-time students and visitors ages 19–25 and 65 & over: $16. Visitors 18 & under and Whitney members: FREE. Admission is pay-what-you-wish on Fridays, 6–9 pm. For general information, please call (212) 570-3600 or visit whitney.org.
You can check out my visit of the exhibit HERE and I am glad to see the extended hours as there was quite a line when I was there on a Wednesday afternoon! This is really a fabulous exhibit not to be missed!!
I had the pleasure of visiting the Whitney Museum of American Art last Wednesday for the exhibit Jeff Koons: A Retrospective. This exhibit is one of the largest and most expensive the museum has ever shown. It also consumes more space for a single exhibit with about 4 floors filled with Jeff Koons artwork. The installation of the show took three weeks, with crews working seven days a week in 11-hour shifts. The expense of this exhibit comes from insurance and shipping and re fabricating, all sculptures are very delicate. This is the last exhibit before the museum moves to the meatpacking district next year.
The restaurant downstairs of the Whitney, with a cool Koons piece high above on the wall. Being there on a Wednesday didn't matter, the line was wrapped around the museum by noon time. They open at 11am, and I decided to see how long it would take me to get through the line. I thought it was a good idea to let only so many folks in, so you could enjoy the exhibit a bit better. The line went rather quick, the exhibit was amazing and I would tell you to run to see it if this is your thing, it closes on October 19, 2014.
Koons was drawn to vacuum cleaners in part because of their association with breathing and their intense psychological connections: “Vacuum cleaners to me were anthropomorphic. . . . They had this sexual reference, having orifices and a sucking power, and their shapes can be both masculine and feminine. It’s probably one of the most aggressive machines you come across if you are one year old and lying around on the floor when your mother is vacuum cleaning.” Koons sometimes emphasized these sexual associations by using wet/dry models and grouping the appliances in a “family unit” that encourages viewers to draw comparisons between the examples. In this work, he juxtaposed what he considered the feminine form of the round canister with the more masculine, even phallic, shape of the uprights. Bathed in cool and eerie light, they become strangely humanoid devices.** wording from the exhibit
In contrast to the perfect smoothness and largely monochromatic palette of many sculptures in Celebration, this one represents an enormous craggy mound of Play-Doh. The material is one of the first that American children use to make simple artworks, and Koons remembers his son proudly presenting him with a Play–Doh sculpture. Yet here the freedom, confidence, and spontaneity of the boy’s initial gesture ironically prompted one of the most complex sculptures Koons has ever made, requiring two decades to fabricate. The sculpture was first conceived in polyethylene but was ultimately fashioned from twenty-seven individual interlocking pieces of painted aluminum, unveiled for the first time in this retrospective. The mountain of Play-Doh may call to mind scatological associations or geological forms, but for Koons, it’s also “a very joyous, very pop material.” A perfect replica of an offhand creation, Play-Doh plays with the distinction between abstraction and representation, while serving as a monument to childlike imagination. ** wording from the exhibit
Please leave a comment if you do get to this exhibition and let me know how you liked it! I think you will be very pleased, and be sure to give yourself time for a line to get in on your schedule. It is worth the wait, and it does go pretty quickly!! For my readers in other countries, it is traveling to France and Spain in the future months. You can check out the Whitney's great online information about the exhibit HERE.
Jeff Koons: A Retrospective is organized by Scott Rothkopf, Nancy and Steve Crown Family Curator and Associate Director of Programs.
The exhibition travels to the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris (November 26, 2014–April 27, 2015) and to the Guggenheim Bilbao (June 5–September 27, 2015).
Today's Words of Wisdom: The first thing that any good artist has to develop is a sense of independence from the artworld. What really destroys a young artist is insecurity, the fear that everything could be taken away at any moment. (Jeff Koons)
