CELEBRATION

"I like the aspect of time. Things aren’t so specific, but each piece represents a certain moment in one’s life: you have a piece of cake, which could be for a wedding; the tulips because it’s spring; a party hat a symbol of a birthday; the diamond ring, maybe for an anniversary; the hanging heart for Valentine’s Day….the objects and images in the series tend to be so large-scale because these types of event are bigger than us as individuals".

In 1994, an invitation to design a calendar inspired Jeff Koons to embark on one of the longest, most technically challenging series to date in his career, Celebration. For this new project, he took photographs and collected images related to holidays and memorable events, looking for easily recognizable archetypes to illustrate every month of the year. His research soon grew more ambitious, leading to a total of 16 paintings and 20 sculptures—some of which are still in progress—whose complexity required the artist to spend years working on and researching the processes and materials involved and their possible alloys or compositions.