‘Changed the language of what art is’: Huge balloon sculpture for national gallery

3 months ago 21

A playful balloon sculpture, part of an iconic series created by controversial pop artist Jeff Koons, has officially joined Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.

Jeff Koons, Balloon Venus Dolni Vestonice (Yellow) 2013–17 gift of Steve and Kylie Shelley.

Balloon Venus Dolni Vestonice (Yellow) is a 2.7-metre high yellow stainless-steel sculpture that reimagines a prehistoric fertility figure as a mirror-polished balloon.

It’s the first of the American artist’s balloon series to enter the collection of an Australian cultural institution and gallery director Nick Mitzevich says he’s more than ready for a public debate over whether the sculpture qualifies as art.

“There are artists in each generation that revolutionises what art is, that challenges people,” Mitzevich said.

“Jackson Pollock re-thought what painting was. In the ’60s and ’70s, Andy Warhol re-thought what art could be, that everyday objects could be art.

“Louise Bourgeois revolutionised the way she made work with her gigantic amazing spiders, for example. What Jeff Koons has done from the 1980s, he has changed the language of what art is. History shows these revolutionaries become the middle ground and the reference points for each generation and I believe that of Jeff Koons.”

Koons melds pop art, conceptual art and minimalism, employing modern materials and highly polished surfaces to riff on everything from household appliances such as the vacuum cleaner to inflatable animals.

Puppy at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

He is best known in Australia as the creator of Puppy, a 12-metre-high terrier made from 60,000 flowering plants and 55,000 tonnes of soil which was installed in the forecourt of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The NGA gift forms part of Koons’s early 2000s Antiquity series, which gives a modern and shiny twist to art history. The original Venus of Dolni Vestonice is one of the oldest-known sculptures and earliest representations of the human body, dating back 30,000 years to the Czech Republic.

Koons created multiple versions of Balloon Venus in yellow, red, magenta, green and blue. Each is a cousin to Koons’s iconic work Balloon Dog, which caused a sensation in 2013 when it sold at Christie’s for $89 million, setting a record auction price for an artwork by a living artist at the time.

Balloon Venus Dolni Vestonice (Yellow) had been on loan from Sydney collectors Steven and Kylie Shelley since 2018, the couple gifting the work to the gallery late 2024 with the wish that it be displayed for the enjoyment of the public.

Wednesday’s official unveiling was delayed to coincide with the visit of Koons to the gallery as part of its American Friends of the National Gallery’s visiting creatives program. American painter and sculptor Jeffrey Gibson will follow this year.

“Our collection has a very strong American base with the abstract expressionists, and pop artists and modernists with major works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg,” Mitzevich said.

“It’s quite curious that Jeff Koons was not in our collection, and so I always thought of that as a gap. I borrowed the Jeff Koons about seven years ago because it is in an Australian collection, and I’d been gently suggesting to Steven and Kylie Shelley that it would be a welcome addition to the collection … after six years of having the work on loan, we are so thrilled for them to have made the donation. ”

For those who might argue that Koons’ balloon artwork is over-simplified and easily replicable, Mitzevich has a ready answer.

“It’s three metres high, made of mirror finished stainless steel with a significant patina on it that emulates a balloon but is the antithesis of a balloon,” he said.

“The creativity of normal day life like a little balloon sculpture is elevated in Jeff’s work. He takes things that we might dismiss as being kitsch or trivial and, with the magic of his materials and scale and the way he connects it to history, he makes works that add to the contribution of art in the 21st century.”

The gift is the latest in large commissions by the national gallery under the leadership of Mitzevich and follows the installation of the $14 million sculpture, Ouroboros, by Lindy Lee, to celebrate its 40th birthday.

In December 2023, the gallery unveiled one of its most expensive and contentious art commissions – an animatronic sculpture by Los Angeles artist Jordon Wolfson.

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