One of the most important, influential, and popular artists of the post-war era, Jeff Koons has built a special relationship with France over his career. In 2008, he was invited to exhibit his works at the Château de Versailles, becoming the first contemporary artist, and the only American one, to be presented in the palace. After the 2015 terror attacks in Paris, Koons offered a sculpture of tulips to the city as a memorial to the victims.
In a special conversation with art historian Joachim Pissarro, Koons will look back at his longstanding connection to France, focusing on his extraordinary exhibition in Versailles and providing insight into his creative process.
40 minutes with Q&A
Book | Versailles: From Louis XIV to Jeff Koons
Lavishly illustrated with archival images and beautiful photography, Versailles: From Louis XIV to Jeff Koons by Assouline recounts the most important milestones of the glittering Château de Versailles, including exhibitions by some of today’s great artists, beginning with Jeff Koons in 2008.
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Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons is one of the most important, influential, and popular artists of the post-war era.
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Since his first solo exhibition in 1980, Jeff Koons’s work has been shown in major galleries and institutions throughout the world. Koons’ art was the subject of a major exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Jeff Koons: A Retrospective (2014), which also traveled to the Centre Pompidou Paris (2014–2015), and to the Guggenheim Bilbao (2015). In 2019, an exhibition of works by Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons was on view at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City. Koons unveiled on of his largest sculptures to date, Bouquet of Tulips, installed in the gardens of Champs-Élysées in Paris in 2019, next to the Petit Palais. Koons is best known for his iconic sculptures, including Balloon Dog (1994–2000), Rabbit (1986), and his monumental floral sculpture, Puppy (1992). Koons has received numerous awards and honors, including the Governor’s Award for the Arts Distinguished Arts Award from Pennsylvania Council Arts. He is an Officier de l’Ordre Natinal de la Légion d’Honneu, and received the State Department’s Medal of the Arts from by then-Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton.
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Joachim Pissarro
Joachim Pissarro is an art historian, theoretician, educator, and director of the Hunter College Galleries.
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He taught at Yale, Osaka, and Sydney universities, before becoming the Bershad Professor of Art History at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He has held curatorial positions at the Kimbell Art Museum (Fort Worth); Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York). In 2013 Pissarro co-founded the company Parallel, which focuses on a symbiotic alliance of architectural and curatorial practices. Pissarro had two major exhibitions in Paris in 2017: Pissarro à Eragny at the Musée du Luxembourg; and Olga Picasso at the Musée Picasso, which traveled widely. He co-curated the show Crystals in Art: Ancient to Today at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR) in the fall of 2019. He is the author of Aesthetics of the Margins / Margins of Aesthetics, with David Carrier (Penn State University, 2019), and Wild Art (Phaidon, 2013). He is curating an exhibition on Jeff Koons for the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, for 2021.
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