David Zwirner, New York;

Private Collection.

Jeff Koons’s Gazing Ball series comprises large-scale white sculptures that depict a wide range of subjects, from famous works dating to Classical Antiquity, to more recognisable forms from the present day. A unifying element across the series, each work features a blue mirrored glass ball, a dramatic contrast with the pristine white surface of the sculpture itself. The glass balls are based on the decorative ornaments that were commonly found in the domestic gardens and patios surrounding the artist’s childhood home in Pennsylvania.

The unique spherical and mirrored quality of the gazing ball means that not only the artwork, but also the viewer and their surroundings are echoed on its surface, absorbing these components into a single image. In this way, the viewer is connected in the present moment to a long-standing cultural history through the medium of the gazing ball.

Koons began to incorporate highly reflective curved surfaces in his sculptures from the mid-1980s onwards, and perhaps most well-known are those used in his balloon animal works. The gazing balls can be seen as a continuation of the consummate attention to detail and materiality found throughout his oeuvre.

The seemingly eclectic selection of subjects of the Gazing Ball works – from the Classical Centaur and Lapith Maiden or Farnese Hercules, to the contemporary, quotidian Snowman or Mailbox – reveals Koons’ outlook upon the shared elements across human history, levelling great works of art history with banal icons of modern society. The artist reduces time and context to become irrelevant, showing that these forms, as well their environment and the beholder, are all equally worthy and equally objective, reflected in the otherworldly blue of the gazing ball.

The Gazing Ball series was created in 2013, and was followed in 2015 by Gazing Ball Paintings, in which Koons applied the same concept to famous paintings from art history. Incorporating the gazing ball motif on a small aluminium shelf attached to the front of each work, the series extended his probing artistic reach to many of the most iconic works of Western art-historical canon, including Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Manet’s Olympia, and The Kiss by Gustav Klimt.

The present work, Gazing Ball (Centaur and Lapith Maiden) is based on the sculpture by the Greek sculptor Phidias, and is drawn from the southern section of the Parthenon Frieze in Athens, often cited as one of the cornerstones of Western art history. The specific scene referenced is from Metope X, now in the Musée du Louvre, that takes its subject from the mythological battle between the Centaurs and the Lapiths. The frieze depicts among the most violent moment from the tale, when one of the inebriated centaurs attempts to rape Hippodamia, the bride of Pirithous, king of the Lapiths. Koons, while paying homage to Phidias, reimagines the ancient model with a contemporary and disenchanted regard, the use of plaster and surprising bolt of blue in the gazing ball causing the viewer to experience the work anew, not as a distant and celebrated object from art history, but as a relatable part of the present. By representing objects such as a birdbath, a mailbox, and a snowman, in the same manner, Koons posits them as of equal merit to the great sculptures of history, each manifestation a product of the society in which they were produced.

Jeff Koons is an internationally-renowned artist whose iconic sculptures are among the most desirable and successful works of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His recognisable pop-style, notably monumental balloon animals made from steel with mirror surfaces, has earned him critical and commercial acclaim, with two of his works setting record auction prices for a living artist: Balloon Dog (Orange) in 2013 and Rabbit in 2019. His work has been shown in major galleries and museums throughout the world, including in 2014–15 as the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which then toured to the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Guggenheim, Bilbao. His works feature internationally in the collections of notable institutions, including MoMA, New York; Tate Gallery, London; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul.