It’s half a century since BMW pioneered the intersection between automotive design and fine art. The very first BMW Art Car was unveiled in 1975, the work of American sculptor Alexander Calder. The idea came from French auctioneer and racing driver Hervé Poulai, who convinced Jochen Neerpasch, the founder and head of BMW Motorsport, to let Calder create the livery of the BMW 3.0 CSL he was entering into that year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans. Despite not finishing, Poulain’s idea set the stage for more collaborations, buoyed by a positive public reception.

The scheme was driven by a collaboration with Leo Castelli, the pioneering New York art gallerist and dealer. Castelli’s contacts brought Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol into the project to create new liveries for Poulain’s subsequent drives at Le Mans. Then in the early 1980s, the Art Car programme opened up and invited artists to work on standard product models, before returning to a racing focus in 1999. Since then, the BMW Art Car has been a dynamic expression of the company’s commitment to the arts in all its forms, ‘a perfect playground for art and design, technology and innovation, motorsport and engineering’.

To celebrate the scope and scale of this ongoing corporate commitment, BMW has released archive imagery of the works in progress, as well as announced a worldwide celebratory programme of exhibitions and displays. The BMW Art Car World Tour will roll through 2025 and 2026, taking select cars to auto shows and fairs, including Art Basel Hong Kong, the Shanghai Auto Show, Art Basel and Contemporary Istanbul. There will also be a major display at the Louwman Museum in The Hague throughout July and August 2025, featuring eight of the 20 cars.

The BMW Art Cars and their creators

Further information on the BMW Art Car Collection can be found at BMW.com

We knew space was being commercialised, but shoppable? Jeff Koons has never been short on ambition, and it turns out that the sky is not his limit, as his latest work, Jeff Koons: Moon Phases, touched down on the lunar surface on Thursday 22 February 2024, on board Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander.

Jeff Koons: Moon Phases – in space, on Earth and an NFT

Koons’ work set to be installed on the moon comprises 125 miniature (one-inch) stainless-steel sculptures in a cubed array designed and built by 4Space in consultation with the artist. Each mini-moon represents a different phase of the moon as seen from various vantage points on Earth and in space, and each bears the name of a luminary, ranging from Plato to David Bowie via Helen Keller and Ada Lovelace. 

The sculptures will be paired with larger (15.5in) twins (and linked NFTs) that will stay on Earth and be made available through Pace Gallery’s Pace Verso – Koons’ partner for Web3 projects. They landed on the lunar surface at 6.23pm EST (11.23pm GMT), and the journey was followed via Intuitive Machines’ live stream. Nasa TV is also screened live coverage.

It all points to a future of lunar endeavour that’s very different from Nasa’s early days. At first glance, though, the 4.3m-high lander that was launched from a SpaceX Falcon 9 looks not unlike its Apollo-era ‘Eagle’ predecessor. There’s that same mix of white and black panels, an array of foil-wrapped sensors and research kit, the same alien mix of bulk and fragility.

But look closer and the difference in concept is plain to see, and not just the neater joins and smarter materials. Where Eagle had a simple ‘United States’ badge, Odysseus is logo-heavy, with the most prominent being that of the tech sportswear brand, Columbia, which provided insulation for the propulsion tank on the surface of the lander using ‘Omni-Heat’ reflective material that is used in its collections and derives from the foil blankets developed by Nasa for the Apollo programme. 

Columbia will not be the last brand on the moon – 4Space is promising a raft of luxury brand tie-ups for the future. As so often, though, Arthur C Clark got there first, with the opening sequences of 2001: A Space Odyssey featuring a Pan Am-branded shuttle and a Hilton space station. Space: Retail’s Final Frontier.

Each of Koons’ NFTs is paired with a sculpture on the moon and its partner on Earth. A selection of images, including a shot of Moon Phases on the lunar surface, is also part of the package. All works are branded with Koons’ signature. 

Watch the Odysseus coverage here

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Barbados-born American contemporary artist Ashley Bickerton has died at the age of 63. 

Bali-based Bickerton’s work grew to prominence in the 1980s, and he is widely named as a contributor to the Neo-Geo movement – or Neo-Geometric Conceptualism – which first arose in New York. Encompassing artists including Peter Halley, Jeff Koons and Meyer Vaisman, the movement commented on social isolation and critiqued consumerism, commercialisation, and society in the late-1900s. 

Though diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2021, Bickerton persevered with his creative pursuits. ‘Life is to be lived and got on with, and I’m busy – too busy – for (pity),’ he told writer Michael Slenske in an interview last year. In 2023, Bickerton’s work will be presented at Gagosian New York, his first solo show with the gallery. 

Bickerton's style took on influences from pop art, op art and minimalism while challenging structural discourses and questioning what the movement referred to as the ‘geometricisation of modern life’. Within the movement, his works drew attention from an early-career Damien Hirst, who recalls not knowing ‘whether he was a painter or sculptor’, and pointing to the indefinable nature of Bickerton’s ever-evolving creative identity. ‘I do not want to be a slave to a signature identifying brand look,’ he explained last year.

In 1993 Bickerton relocated from New York to Bali, and with his new home came new expressions; the abstraction in his work made way for confrontational depictions of the human form. 

His oversized sculptures took the form of skin, bodies bound by rope, and twisting arcs of necks housing contorted faces. His years away from the creative scene he was so heavily involved in caused his work to evolve within Neo-Geo towards surrealism. 

In recent years, Bickerton’s work took on a more dystopian surrealism, while maintaining his potent comments on consumerism and human civilisation. In October 2022, he presented works in Paris alongside Nathaniel Mary Quinn and Brice Marden at Paris+ par Art Basel, and his work has been shown at galleries in New York, LA and Singapore throughout 2022, including the notable exhibition ‘Seascapes at the End of History’ at Lehmann Maupin New York. These complex exhibitions, often combining sculpture, relief, painting and assemblage, brought dynamism and vibrancy to their audiences, much like the legacy Ashley Bickerton will leave behind. 

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In 1975 Hervé Poulain, a French auctioneer and art enthusiast with a sideline in auto racing, came up with a novel idea for combining his passions. Poulain planned on competing in the 24 Hours of Le Mans race and wanted to make a splash, whether he made the podium or not. He approached BMW Motorsport chief Jochen Neerpasch with the idea of commissioning an artist to paint a racing-spec BMW 3 series. Neerpasch liked the plan and they approached Poulain’s pal Alexander Calder who liked the plan too and got to work, initially working on a toy car before the BMW workshop upscaled his design.

That debut Art Car was imagined as a one-off – a passion project rather than a PR device – but it created such a positive spin that 19 artists, including Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol (who famously painted his car, by hand, in 29 minutes), Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Jenny Holzer, John Baldessari and Olafur Eliasson, have added to the list of BMW Art Cars, making it one of the most dynamic, enduring and compelling collaborative art projects. 

Only one artist, though, has been invited back. In 2010, Jeff Koons designed the 17th BMW Art Car, an M3 GT2 that also competed in Le Mans. Koons was such a fan of the Art Car series – and given his clear interest in Duchampian readymades and the Pop Art of Lichtenstein and Warhol, you understand why – he actually offered his services to BMW.

That relationship has grown and Koons and the German auto-giant have now collaborated again on The 8 X Jeff Koons, the first of the Art Car series to go into (very limited) production. 

Only 99 of the Koons-pimped M850i xDrive Gran Coupés – which he describes as ‘sporty and flashy as well as minimalist and conceptual’ – will be produced, at the rate of two a week. The cars were launched digitally earlier this year and – all but one – were sold within three weeks. 

The 8 X Jeff Koons made its first physical public appearance outside the Rockefeller Centre in New York earlier this month, a trailer for a Christie’s auction of the last available car from the production run. It eventually sold for $475,000, with all proceeds going to the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children. (Koons is a major benefactor to the charity. The artist turned to them for help in the 1990s when his ex-wife Ilona Staller refused him the right to see their son Ludwig. Koons talks openly and movingly about the pain of that separation.)

Koons is big on family – he has six children with his wife, the artist Justine Wheeler – and the new car is a relatively family-friendly four-seater. ‘I wanted a car I would actually drive,’ says Koons – but the design is closer to his first design for the debut race car. ‘My original idea was the car would go by on the track and suddenly you would see “Pop! Pop! Pop!” And it would be like these energy explosions taking place.’

Koons’ plan A for his debut car was to exaggerate the effect using lenticulars, but the idea proved impractical on a race car – ‘I wanted to make a car that had a chance of winning,’ he says. It’s even more impractical on a production car but Koons has returned to the ‘Pop! Pop!’ and a puff of smoke device, this time meticulously rendered in paint. 

‘I really wanted to return to something a little warm and minimal but with this essence of thrust and energy,’ he says. ‘So I've worked with lines starting in the front that are very thin and then get wider as you go back over the surface of the car. You get this sense of aerodynamics and these little popping areas of energy.’ 

BMW’s head of cultural engagement, Thomas Girst, says Koons made Covid-inconvenienced visits to its Dingolfing and Landshut plants as his design was realised while the Koons team in New York worked on complex digital designs. Getting the artist's suggested paint job right initially took 300 hours of specialist man and woman power, but the company says they have since got that down to a more manageable 250 hours.

Koons was insistent, though, that this design be realised in paint rather than as a printed vinyl wrap, the device used on his first art car (itself, no mean technical feat). ‘I love the generosity of paint,’ Koons says. ‘When something is printed you never get that saturation, you never get that generosity, the way light bounces of pigment.’

The red and leather interior, meanwhile, has a definite if unintentional Spider-Man vibe. ‘I didn’t plan that people look at it and think of Spider-Man but I did want them to feel that type of energy, feel something else running through their veins.’

Koons and Spider-Man do have some history. The producers of the Oscar-winning animated movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse admit that the Whitney Museum’s 2014 Koons retrospective was an influence and the idea has been floated that the car appear in a future Marvel production. Koons is somewhat sceptical. 

He is keen to work with BMW again, though. ‘I hope that BMW invites me back. I hope that I could work on an electric car or some type of prototype car of the future. This car thrills and heightens the senses but I hope I have the opportunity to design something from scratch that can comfort and protect.’ 

Few places rival the intensity of Doha. Even in late November, your face is cocooned in heat; the horizon wobbles, sizzles and steams. Somewhere between England and Qatar, the colours have turned from green to gold. Doha emerges like a gilded, water-encircled canvas, primed for anyone with a creative vision as vast as its landscape. 

I’m with a small group of journalists at the invitation of Qatar Museums. We’re here to witness the fruits of the country's cultural transformation; one born with the discovery of oil in the mid-20th century, and that has since evolved into a contemporary Renaissance that has the attention of the world. 

Day 1 in Doha: Jeff Koons, lunch at the Culture Pass Club, Christian Dior

At Qatar Museums’ Gallery Al Riwaq, we find Jeff Koons: ‘Lost in America’. This is the artist’s first show in the Gulf, and its significance is not lost on Qatar.

Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, the show is presented as part of the Qatar-United States 2021 Year of Culture. Koons has conceived it as an expanded self-portrait of sorts. We’re greeted by a photograph of him aged five, earnest, doe-eyed, and with that unmistakable, ready-made beam that’s followed him throughout his career. He wears the same expression at the press conference, where he quotes The Beatles’ ‘I am the Walrus’: ‘I am he as you are he as you are me’, and reasserts his well-trodden principles: transcendence, transformation and self-acceptance.

These days, the locations of Koons’ exhibitions feel just as significant as their contents. As a concession to regional norms, the show is devoid of the raunchier facets of his work, yet it doesn’t feel deprived. 

The sheer enormity of the museum means the pieces are socially distanced. Until now, I had never quite appreciated the extent of Koons’ calculating precision, his ability to optically toy with the viewer and suspend disbelief. He metamorphoses materials: bronze resembles vinyl, plaster looks like a cotton-covered inflatable, and, in his newest works, marble is dressed down as though an oversized ceramic trinket. These replicas of replicas reflect just how easily we fall for artifices; rather than critiquing consumerism, they celebrate it. 

At lunchtime, we head to Qatar’s first members-only arts club, Culture Pass Club. Think Soho House, but if every house consisted of multiple houses encircling an idyllic courtyard and had interiors by the likes of India Mahdavi, Rossana Orlandi and leading local designers including Aisha Al-Sowaidi and Wadha Al Hajri. 

Next on the itinerary is M7, Qatar’s 312,000 sq ft hub for fashion and design innovation. Earlier in November, the fashion world elite gathered at the art centre for the Fashion Trust Arabia prize, recognising emerging talent in the Middle East and North Africa region. 

Following a momentary distraction from a thorny Isa Genzken sculpture in M7’s atrium, we shift our focus to ‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’. It’s a reinvention of a resoundingly successful exhibition that previously showed in Paris, London, Shanghai and New York, and features pieces from the private collection of Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, mother of the Emir and long-time Dior client. 

In the evening, we head back to Gallery Al Riwaq for the ‘Lost in America’ reception. It’s disorientating and refreshing to mingle at an art world vernissage unaccompanied by flutes of champagne (In deference to Sharia law, the Qatari government places strict restrictions on the availability of alcohol). But what it lacks in booze, Qatar makes up for in juice, offered liberally, and in most shades of the rainbow. Armed with hyper-real sobriety and tripping on a sugar high, we’re all ready to focus on the art. 

It’s dinnertime, and presumably owing to good behaviour, we’ve been invited by Her Excellency Sheikha Al Mayassa Bint Hamad Al-Thani, chairperson of Qatar Museums (and cultural arbiter of the nation) to attend the official dinner for Koons. I’m sartorially ill-prepared for the occasion, but manage to dress up my practical desert-wear to a passable standard. 

We’re ushered to a palatial first-floor courtyard at the IM Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art – which is officially closed for renovation. The architect, who was 91 when he was coaxed out of retirement for the project, was given free rein to choose any spot in Doha for the museum, and he insisted that future buildings could not encroach on its space. The solution? Qatar gave the building its own island. 

There’s more multicoloured juice on silver platters, and American-themed food on the menu. There’s also a photo booth for the star-studded guest list. (Photo booth is an understatement, I mean a self-contained studio where Brigitte Lacombe, portraitist to superstars, is taking the photographs).

After dinner, we’re taken to the underground conservation laboratory. An expert restorer shows us to his workstation, where the magic is happening. We swarm like insatiable magpies around a falcon from 17th-century India: solid gold and laden in rubies, emeralds, diamonds and sapphires. It’s impossibly beautiful, priceless beyond comprehension, and shimmers to the point of hypnosis. Suddenly, this begins to feel rather familiar – Jeff Koons would be all over this! Right on cue, he arrives at the lab for a closer look. 

Day 2: Sport, Virgil Abloh, a history of Qatar

I have a hangover. Not the post-alcohol kind, but a juice-induced sugar comedown of epic proportions. But enough whining, it’s time for sport. 

Today is the first day of the inaugural Qatar Grand Prix Formula One and sport is on the agenda. Around Doha, construction is in abundance as Qatar spruces up to host the 2022 World Cup, which will kick off in precisely one year. It’s a palpably exciting crescendo, but has not been without controversy. Qatar’s treatment of migrant workers responsible for World Cup-related infrastructure has been under intense scrutiny. The Qatari government disputed a 16 November 2021 report by Amnesty International claiming that labour reforms have not translated into changes on the ground, but also stated that ‘Qatar has never shied away from acknowledging that its labour system is still a work in progress.’ 

We are treated to a preview tour of the soon-to-open 3-2-1 Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum, sited adjacent to the Khalifa International Stadium. As an arts journalist, I’m a little out of my depth, but nonetheless an eager student. The museum aims to educate and entertain, offering a history of Qatari sport while providing family-focused interactive games to encourage physical activity. 

Next, we head to the W Hotel for another dose of Jeff Koons. This time, he’s in conversation with Sheikha Al Mayassa as part of the Art for Tomorrow Talks, in association with The New York Times. Just as I reflect on how, in the last three months, I have spent more time in the physical presence of Koons than I have my own mother, it’s time for art by Virgil Abloh. 

Like Koons’, this is Abloh’s first museum exhibition in the Middle East. Held at Fire Station, an arts hub and artist residency centre, ‘Figures of Speech’ offers a deep dive into Abloh's pioneering media practice spanning visual arts, music, fashion, architecture and design. (Since our visit, the show – a mid-career retrospective  – has taken on a new poignancy. On Sunday 28 November, in a moment that shook the world, the celebrated artist Virgil Abloh passed away from a rare cancer, aged 41.)  

The next stop is the Jean Nouvel-designed National Museum of Qatar, which blooms from the landscape like a desert rose. This extraordinary building comprises flying saucer-like discs of varying diameters, which engulf the restored palace of Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani, son of the founder of modern Qatar.

The galleries tell us about the history of Qatar, without following the conventional museum formula. Here, everything from the natural history of the Persian Gulf to the establishment of the Qatari state, and to the discovery of oil is narrated via innovative audiovisual elements, seamlessly integrated into Nouvel’s design. The museum celebrates the heritage of Qatar, but also puts a spotlight on its rapid modernisation, growth and extraordinary cultural change. 

We head back to the hotel on Doha’s gleaming new UNStudio-designed metro. Completed in 2019, the network is divided into three travel sections: Standard, Family (for solo women and anyone commuting with children) and Gold (for Goldclub Travel Card holders). Boasting rapid speeds, onboard Wi-Fi and USB charging for Goldclub members, this is surely the envy of the subterranean world, and makes most of the London Underground look and smell like Dante’s Inferno. 

Day 3: Kader Attia, a palace of books, and the desert sun set on Richard Serra

We arrive at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. Following a momentary malfunction of the Ehteraz app (Qatar’s mandatory Covid-19 contact-tracing service), I’m soon in the clutches of ‘Kader Attia: On Silence’, a show of staggering scale, depth and intensity. Attia turns his focus to the complex histories of the Middle East and North Africa, and Doha itself, a multicultural global city of migration and constant social and political evolution.

At the centre of the show is the title work, On Silence. One of two new commissions for the exhibition, it comprises a room filled with prostheses suspended from the ceiling. Though unsettling in their number, they are presented as objects of restoration and optimism for those who have lost limbs in conflict. Attia uses silence as a vehicle for communication: silence to cut through the noise of human suffering (colonialism, political oppression and environmental devastation), enforced silence as a catalyst for trauma, voluntary silence as a conduit to reckoning and repair. 

In the 1970s, Doha was but a few modest buildings surrounded by desert. Its statement piece was the spaceship-esque Sheraton Hotel, a striking example of modernism by architect William L Pereira (who also designed San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid) that perfectly straddles utopia and dystopia. These days, the skyline is a tapestry of architectural delights, particularly in the Education City.

We’re here to visit the Rem Koolhaas-designed Qatar National Library, a vast, tiered, glass-clad palace of books and artefacts fit for the digital age. This high-tech sanctuary for research also functions as a custodian of Qatar’s heritage by preserving and making accessible the country’s recorded history. 

As the sun sets on our tour of Doha, there is one final stop, the middle of the desert. Our Jurassic Park-style off-roaders jiggle over the undulating dunes through the Brouq Nature Reserve. After 20 minutes of dizzying motion, we reach our destination: a natural corridor formed by gypsum plateaus, home to one of the most triumphant examples of public art: Richard Serra’s East-West/West-East (2014). The installation comprises four vertiginous slabs of Corten steel, each 14m high, with rusted-matte surfaces absorbing the ethereal orange sun.

Spanning more than a kilometre, East-West/West-East slices up the sky like an oversized game of dominoes being played by some higher, much larger power. If an epiphany could occur anywhere, it’s surely here.

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Recent times have demanded reflection, and no artist has used this motif in more variety, or notoriety, than American artist Jeff Koons. 

Throughout his career, Koons has hoovered up art history – executed in literal terms with his 1980s vacuum cleaner readymades – and refashioned the fragments into something entirely new. Through kitsch-rich household ornaments and cut-and-pasted motifs from pop culture, he elevates the low-brow onto the pedestal of high art, until we barely know the difference. 

Koons has a knack for reflecting the idealism in human history; reflecting contemporary times, in all its mass-consumerist, superficial and voyeuristic banality; and making work that literally reflects, consumes and warps its surroundings, and all those who observe. 

We gawp like magpies at his clusters of shiny things: polished stainless steel casts of balloon dogs, bloated, faceless rabbits, and gazing balls perched on, in and around iconic examples of classicalism.

The more we look, the more Koons’ work looks at home within the storied walls of the Palazzo Strozzi, where he is currently staging a major solo show, ‘Shine’. The Florentine building – whose foundations were laid in 1489 – sustains part of the Renaissance’s bloodstream, and the Renaissance flows freely and abundantly in that of Koons. 

Curated by Arturo Galansino and Joachim Pissarro and spanning 40 years of work, ‘Shine’ offers Koons’ greatest gleaming hits, but with a renewed luminosity, potential and intensity. It’s an invitation to look back, look ahead, and look hard. 

Wallpaper*: Where are you as we speak?

Jeff Koons: I’m in New York City, in my studio on 10th Avenue and 36th Street. I’m sitting in a small office where I keep my paperwork and books for the projects I’m working on. The studio has two floors, different to the previous studio in Hudson Yards, which has now been developed. Right outside my office is my 3D department, which is where most of my work is generated today. 

W*: When did you switch from creating in analogue to digital?

JK: Years ago I made everything myself: my vacuum cleaner pieces, even the stands of the One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank. I would have somebody do the welding but I would do all the finishing work.

I started working digitally around 1994. Elephant was the first piece where I took the information to a computer to manufacture the artwork. Since then, I’ve relied more and more on different types of scanning: white light scanning, blue light scanning, CAT scanning to print images and create models or to mill a material. So instead of building up, we’re taking away. 

W*: Your work seems to lend itself well to digital production, reproduction and tweaking.

JK: I always doodle. So if I have an idea, or I’m thinking about something, I make a doodle. And I make mental notes. Technology is only a tool and there’s no art in that technology; it’s just a vehicle for you to realise ideas more clearly. And if it can help you be more precise in your communication of those ideas, fantastic. 

There’s no real newness beyond the novelty of something. Within art, what presents itself as shocking and fresh is actually quite old.

W*: I read your piece in the Financial Times. I’d never really thought about relating the Renaissance so closely to how we live right now. Maybe we’re overdue a Renaissance renaissance, or at least thinking about it that way. 

JK: I agree completely. There were always new technologies, whether it’s the wheel, or irrigation, or fluid dynamics. We continue to readapt, but I do think that the time we live in is like a Renaissance. All of us have the most complete history of humankind at our fingertips. 

W*: It’s interesting psychologically. If you can’t remember the name of an artist now, all you have to do is Google. Before, you’d have to delve deep into your brain for that information.

JK: You’d have to go to the library or call a friend, or you’d have to think about something for a lot longer. But these things are having a huge impact on our society and our ability to be generous. What’s important now is that as human beings, we can open ourselves up to life experience.  

I remember after having a really very successful exhibition, my ‘Banality’ show in 1988, a journalist asked me, ‘Jeff, aren’t you afraid it’s gonna leave you?’ And I thought, ‘leave me?’ You know, this big success as a young artist. I started to think about what I could do and realised the only thing that any of us can do is to trust in ourselves. So the work in ‘Shine’ at Palazzo Strozzi is dealing with this aspect of transcendence: what’s relevant in life is the essence of our potential. 

In the Renaissance, I think people were opening themselves up. They had these technologies, but there was something else that brought along a sense of curiosity. 

W*: Is that what you most admire about Renaissance art, how it captured humanity in a way that nothing had before? 

JK: I think they had a great curiosity and great respect for the past. When the Florentines and Romans were unearthing a lot of ancient Greek and ancient Roman pieces, this had a huge impact on society; coming into contact with ideals of the ancient past. 

W*: I was at your show at the Ashmolean in 2019, and I suppose there are parallels between that show and ‘Shine’: the meeting of the ancient and new, reflection and the viewer ‘activating’ the work.

JK: I was very proud of that exhibition [at the Ashmolean]. I loved it. 

I started making art as a young kid and would always draw and paint, and I never knew what art was. When I was in art school and learned about art history, I started to realise how it connects all the human disciplines. When I graduated from art school and started to really focus on my work, there were moments I would create things that were so powerful to me that they would overtake me physically. I’d have to go out and have some beers just to come down from the experience of putting a pink rabbit beside an inflatable flower on four mirrored panels. The colours were so bright; it was such an intense experience. That’s when it started to become greater than myself.

Even though I try to make work that’s very much about the viewer, and I know the viewer finishes it, I’m still very selfish. I want to make works that really move me and perform like a drug in intensity. 

W*: Otherwise, what’s the point? 

JK: Correct. In more primitive times, it’s like going out on a hunt. Originally, you would come home with a hare, and that’s enough for you. But after a while, you realise, ‘Oh, wait, I want to bring back a mammoth’. And so you go hunting a mammoth. That’s what I like to do today.

W*: It’s quite difficult to convey this idea of ‘Shine’ over a screen. In the last two years, have you reflected on the importance of in-person experiences in your work? 

JK: The pandemic is a horrible experience. We’ve all lost friends, and we know many people who have lost family members. But if anything was positive it would have been the intimacy that we were able to have with our friends and family. Unbelievable intimacy, it’s hard to let go of that. That was quite special.

At the same time, when we’re faced with moments where we have time to reflect; we go over what’s relevant in life, and what’s important. In ‘Shine’, I’m trying to bring to the forefront the way I view art, the way it can function, and be of true value to people. 

People that speak about art today, and the many different publications that write about it, just end up speaking about all the superficial aspects of it, instead of ‘here’s this transcending power that lets us come into contact with the essence of our potential’.

W*: Is that essence something we’ve lost sight of? Do you think it was more present in previous movements, like Dadaism or Surrealism?

JK: When you mention Dada or the Surrealists, I get excited, because I always want to participate and be part of the dialogue; to be in a room and talk about art. 

People feel very intimidated by my work, but it always tries to empower the viewer and let them know that they are perfect. We’re all perfect in our being. Our past can’t be anything other than what it is, it’s not going to change. But we can change from this moment forward. 

I know from my own experience of where I came from, what my past has been, what things I survived, that it’s about real experience. So that’s why I would make works like Ushering in Banality, Puppy or Balloon Dog. It’s about human history.

People can’t achieve transcendence and reach a higher consciousness without really being open, without appreciating and loving other people. And as soon as that happens, you’re able to find something greater than the self, you’re able to envision that there’s a place to go, there’s a path, there’s a vastness, there’s the ability to transcend.

W*: So you feel the only way to transcend is through relationships with others?

JK: It’s finding something greater than the self, getting out of the self and being able to give it up to something. I mean, you hear about love all the time in our culture: love, love, love, love! Love, in the abstract form, is giving it up to something outside the self. 

W*: Have there been times when you’ve reached particularly intense moments of transcendence? 

JK: When I’m really focusing on my work. I spoke before about trusting in the self, then very intensely focusing on those interests. Everything becomes very, very objective, everything seems familiar, you are very aware of the abundance of information around you. 

I try to always practise the removal of judgment. Judgment only creates anxiety, it only segregates. 

W*: Don’t you have to retain a certain level of judgment for quality control?

JK: I don’t really think of that as judgment. I think that there are things that have a sense of significance at a certain time. I may want to bring something in a certain direction, and that doesn’t mean that the other direction isn’t any good, but right at this moment, for this piece, I’d like to bring it there. I like to be open to everything, and when you’re open everything, you realise everything is so stimulating and everybody looks familiar.

W*: What’s the most challenging project you’ve worked on? 

JK: There have always been challenges in creating different projects and different bodies of work. Sometimes it can be having the right technology or level of craft at that moment, or it could be financial, it could be all different aspects. 

I just follow my intuition and my interests. Usually, before I make anything, I’ve been thinking about it for at least two years. I want to be sure that when I do make something, I’m using the opportunity I have to its fullest; that it’s something I really want to make. Then I commit to doing it. I thought about the Gazing Ball work for over three decades. When I made my Rabbit, if you look in the head of Rabbit, I was really thinking about a gazing ball. 

I wanted something very pure, and finally, I made the plaster casts and the paintings in the Gazing Ball series. That wasn’t struggling, that was just thinking about the most ideal situation. 

W*: Do you have a favourite piece of Renaissance art? 

JK: I’m always very moved by Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà. It deals with itself, but it also goes into all these different areas of history and theology. And Titian’s Pastoral Concert, that’s not in Florence, but it’s amazing. Raphael’s work, and in Florence, Uccello’s painting The Battle of San Romano, all the Botticellis, the Donatellos. 

We just had an amazing exhibition in New York at The Metropolitan Museum based on the Medici family. The Bronzino paintings are so animated, so colourful, and so contemporary, though I know it’s corny to say. They have a Disney quality, a Pixar quality. 

I think people respected the idea of making a mark in the Renaissance, as though they were recording the history of what it means to be human, which we take for granted today. We don’t have to record, we don’t have to synthesise what an experience is really like, but they synthesised it, they personally took on that responsibility. 

Jeff Koons, ‘Shine’, until 30 January 2022, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, palazzostrozzi.org

ADDRESS

Piazza degli Strozzi
50123 Firenze FI

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‘Sculpture to Wear’, a partnership between Louisa Guinness, of London’s Louisa Guinness Gallery, and Tiffany Dubin, of Sotheby’s New York, puts jewellery made by contemporary artists as the focus of a new selling exhibition at Sotheby’s East Hampton. It includes artist jewellery by the likes of Jeff Koons, Anish Kapoor and Alexander Calder.

‘I believe that artist jewellery is an introduction to the artist’s essence, much in the same way as drawings, but jewellery has the added extraordinary magic of being art that you can wear,’ says Dubin. ‘This tactile connection reinforces how an individual has chosen to define his or her own aesthetic.’

Jewellery encompasses sensual curves and playful motifs in pieces that encapsulate the artist’s aesthetic. Jeff Koons draws a rabbit in platinum and dangles it from a pendant in a mischievous Playboy reference, while Anish Kapoor works with a goldsmith to cast hypnotising pools in pink and blue enamel. Claude Lalanne’s apples of galvanised copper add an elegance to earlobes; Alexander Calder’s brooch is a sculptural scribble of brass; Gavin Turk’s discarded apple cores are given new life when coated in gold or silver. Man Ray’s piece, complete with detachable pendant, is inspired by his 1936 painting, The Lovers – setting an intimate scene of a kiss of golden lips on the neck, it is wryly offset with the characteristically surreal touch of a hole, which the wearer can look through to alter their vision.

‘Artist jewellery pieces are small art treasures that reflect not only the time when they were made but also the artist’s position on the art stage within a network of institutions – museums, galleries, foundations, art collections and schools,’ adds Dubin. ‘This all adds to the fun of collecting works of sculpture that can be worn, carrying within the intrinsic characteristics of the design and the artist’s vision.’

For Guinness, the artists’ lack of formal jewellery training brings a welcome, instinctive rawness: ‘Painters and sculptors are not jewellers, and they do not spend most of their time making or designing jewellery,’ she says. ‘This is important because they are not trained in the field, and approach jewellery from a conceptual perspective. Artists are free of a goldsmith’s technical constraints and therefore are not restricted from conceiving designs that might elude a classic jeweller. They make things that are more challenging to wear and interesting to see – they bring a fresh perspective.’

INFORMATION
‘Sculpture to Wear’ from the Louisa Guinness Gallery London is on show at Sotheby’s East Hampton from 3 to 28 August

sothebys.com

When mulling over a career in contemporary art, one might consider bending the ear of one of the most distinctive, divisive and expensive names in the game. 

In his first-ever lesson for MasterClass – the streaming platform where members can learn from the ‘world’s best’ in a range of fields – Jeff Koons teaches the art of trusting instincts and spinning everyday objects and experiences into source material. ‘Art can be a vehicle that lets us transcend the self and through generosity lets us share this transcendence with the external world,’ says Koons. ‘In my MasterClass, I’m going to ask you to be courageous, confident and not think of art as the finished product but as a process of becoming something vaster.’ 

Taking his iconic Balloon Dog as a case study, the artist and former Wallpaper* Guest Editor takes a deep dive into his own career, offering participants access to the inner workings of his very singular art creation processes. Members will learn how to defamiliarise familiar objects and elevate the banal to high art through immense scale, arresting colour and innovative technology.

Koons admirers might be particularly enticed by a rare opportunity to step behind the curtain into the artist’s stoneworking facility for a sneak peek at Pink Ballerina, an until now unseen sculpture that has been in the works for almost a decade.

In his class, Koons breaks down the ‘major building blocks’ of art: colour, texture, scale and form. ‘Ideas come from sensations. You don’t have ideas without having sensations’, he explains in his MasterClass trailer. ‘The art is never in the painting that you’re looking at, or the surface of a sculpture. The art is inside you.’ 

So how might one blaze a similar trail to Koons’? Concluding on a humble, uplifting, and somewhat reassuring note, the world-leading contemporary artist admits that there is, in fact, nothing special about him. ‘There’s nothing special about my experiences other than they were my experiences and I’ve embraced them.’ he says. ‘Your experiences, everything about you, it’s perfect.’

Trailer for Jeff Koons’ MasterClass lesson. Courtesy of MasterClass

INFORMATION

Koons’ lesson is now available on MasterClass with an annual membership

masterclass.com
jeffkoons.com

Last month, Jeff Koons’ ‘Rabbit’ – a three foot tall stainless steel sculpture resembling a kid’s inflatable balloon – became the most expensive artwork by a living artist, sold at a Christie’s auction for $91.1 million. Koons’ status as a boundary-pushing art world provocateur has creative parallels with the current aesthetic output of Moncler, who have swapped traditional seasonal collections for monthly drops, and subverted the classical outerwear status of its label with Moncler Genius, a project which asks designers to rethink its signature down-filled jackets. 

Koons’ mirror surfaced sculptures were of particular inspiration to Francesco Ragazzi, whose 8 Moncler Palm Angels collection and accompanying presentation took inspiration from a vandalised image of one of the American artist’s exhibitions. Instead of designing his collection first, interestingly Ragazzi – who launched Palm Angels in 2014, and began his career as an intern at Moncler – conceived its accompanying A/W 2019 Milan Fashion Week presentation beforehand. ‘I worked backwards’, he explains of the event which was imagined as traditionally clean exhibition space, before its walls were sprayed with multicoloured paint. ‘I wanted to vandalise the purity of an art gallery. In the same way, I’ve vandalised the purity of Moncler.’

Ragazzi worked with artist and choreographer Willi Dorner – whose urban artworks incorporate the human form – on a series of exhibition photographs, featuring standing, diving and suspended bodies interacting with stark Milanese architecture, wearing jewel-coloured metallic ski suits. Their sky blue, lilac and emerald tones nod to the mirrored sheen of Koons’ cartoonish and balloon animal sculptures. ‘The pieces are made from laminated nylon,’ he explains. ‘I’ve never seen a metallic jacket like that before.’

8 Moncler Palm Angels ‘Art Breaking’ collection launches this week, and the release will see a series of global art showcases, from London to New York, including a roster of vandalised store fronts, tagged with bold red ‘Palm Angels’ graffiti. ‘Coming back to Moncler is an amazing feeling,’ Ragazzi says. ‘As an intern I used to dream about what I could achieve at the brand. Now I can actually do it.’

INFORMATION
For more information, visit the Moncler website

Jeff Koons is back. The American artist and art commerce kingpin has just opened his latest show at Oxford’s Ashmolean, the world’s oldest public museum. Seventeen significant works – 14 of which make their first appearance on UK soil – span the artist’s career and radically distinctive oeuvre including Equilibrium, Antiquity and Gazing Ball in a show curated by Koons himself and his long-term friend and collaborator, Sir Norman Rosenthal.

Since he burst onto the scene in the early 1980s, the former Wall Street stock jockey came to embody the blue collar, blue chip creative, not least because of the stunning market value of his work. We watched in awe and outrage as the new boy in town spun kitsch into a high art amid a mob of gutsy neo-expressionists. Releasing that Made in Heaven series of 1991 – a billboard depicting the artist’s coital jaunts with then-wife, porn star and politician, Cicciolina – saw him ascend to new heights of notoriety and net worth.

Koons’ work is a vacuum of the art canon, a notion he executed in very literal terms in early work: everyday objects like vacuum cleaners, basketballs and twee household ornaments were elevated onto the pedestal of high art. This is an artist who once compared his own work to Francis Picabia and his studio to Raphael’s. Unlike these historical titans, Koons’ art brokerage – an industrial-scale studio based in Hudson Yards, New York – is far from a one-man operation.

Over time, he has devised a rigorous colour-by-numbers system using meticulously trained assistants executing each piece as if done by Koons’ own hand. But as the 1990s arrived, this method of art production proved to be anything but financially watertight, costing so much and taking so long that it brought Koons and his empire to the brink of bankruptcy.

Koons arrives at the exhibition – minus any entourage – typically suited and noticeably reputed by all who gawp like magpies at his cluster of shiny things. ‘I’ve always performed very intuitively as an artist. I like to think of the body and the mind together,’ he reflects.

It’s not long before Ashmolean visitors’ senses are inflated with the most classic of all Koons: polished stainless steel casts of cheap party balloons twisted into a crossbred rabbit and a bloated, magenta iteration of the Ice Age-era Venus of Willendorf. ‘I look at the reflection and the surfaces and I think of the philosophy, and the idea to reflect and contemplate,’ he says.

In recent years, Koons has scaled back his workforce, favouring computer-aided design, which has only heightened his pathological creative perfectionism. His balloon sculptures are now engineered through CT scans and data analysis, which Koons can manage on a micro scale, explaining he ‘can be responsible for every thousandth of a millimetre’.

In his Antiquity series (2009 onwards) Koons collages hyperrealists fusion of culture overlaid with liberal mark making and Ben-Day Dots. Antiquity 2 (Dots) sees a scantily clad Gretchen Mol playing Bettie Page and riding a dolphin. ‘It’s a representation of a desire and our biology, genes and DNA,’ he says of the series. But with their cut-and-paste classical sculptures, assortments of bodies and anonymous fleshy lumps, these feel more like a collision of Hustler magazine and a trip to the Pantheon. Elsewhere, his Gazing Ball series (2012) has steel cobalt baubles hijack the most celebrated paintings and sculptures in history – posed on the shoulder of the burly Belvedere Torso, and perched on the deck of The Raft of Medusa.

Perhaps Koons’ work is more at home at the venerable Ashmolean than at first glance. The historical treasures in this building are part of antiquity’s bloodstream, and antiquity in turn flows in Koons. ‘I had no idea about the power of art until my first art history lesson in college. Art so effortlessly connects you with all the human disciplines,’ adds the artist. ‘It’s about the removal of judgement. Art is not about high art – you don't have to bring anything to it apart from who you are.’

Koons is a lot of things: modern master of the readymade, appropriator, re-appropriator, cultural meddler and master of his own PR. But here at the Ashmolean, he has allowed past and present, priceless and the ludicrously priced to occupy the same space, as equals. ‘I couldn’t think of a better place to have a dialogue about art today and what it can be.’

INFORMATION

‘Jeff Koons: At The Ashmolean’ is on view from 7 February – 9 June. For more information, visit the Ashmolean website

ADDRESS

Ashmolean
Beaumont Street
Oxford OX1 2PH

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When the American business Steve Wynn was looking to open his eponymous Las Vegas resort in 2005, the casino magnate had intended to name the $2.4bn hotel La Rêve after a Picasso portrait he owned at the time. A prolific art collector, Wynn has long adorned his properties with European masterpieces and contemporary giants from his private collection. A roll of the roulette dice in front of a multimillion-dollar Manet may once have seemed an oddity, but extravagant art displays have since become the dernier cri of gambling joints.

So to Korea, where Paradise City is the latest entertainment resort to unveil a dedicated new art space, boasting a collection befitting of a museum. Take Jeff Koons’ sculpture Gazing Ball (Farnese Hercules) and Damien Hirst’s Aurous Cyanide painting, which both reside at the entrance where works from the permanent collection will be displayed. Upstairs, monumental installations by Korean artists Lee Bae and Kim Hodeuk dominate the first and second floor galleries.

Both installations consider the allure of the colour black, explored through traditional materials of charcoal and ink. Lee Bae’s Issu de feu (2018) comprises hundreds of charcoal pieces on Korean hanji paper bound together like tree trunks. Similarly, Kim Hodeuk’s delves into darkness with All of Sudden, Drawing the Space (2018) where a series of hanji papers suspended above mirror inky liquid seemingly converges on itself. The shadows cast by the installation on the surrounding white walls are a decided part of the work.

The inaugural exhibition ‘Overstated & Understated’ has been curated by fashion designer and director Jung Kuho. Further works by blue-chip names including Ugo Rondinone, Robert Indiana, Subodh Gupta, Anish Kapoor, and Yayoi Kusama are installed throughout Paradise City. The 330,000 sq m resort is a 1.3 trillion won ($1.14 billion) joint venture between Korean casino operator Paradise Group and Japanese entertainment company Sega Sammy. The art space is part of the next phase of the development, which also includes the luxury boutique hotel Art Paradiso and concept spa Cimer.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Paradise City website

ADDRESS

Paradise City
186 Yeongjonghaeannam-ro 321beon-gil
Jung-gu
Incheon

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The 1980s: the decade of decadence, power shoulders, big hair, big bucks and Generation X. As the biggest ad agencies of the era – among them Saatchi & Saatchi, the WPP group – ate up the smaller fish becoming huge conglomerates, and cable TV arrived, commercial culture began to cut its teeth.

Meanwhile in New York, a group of young, gung-ho artists responded to the insatiable consumerism with art that both attacked and absorbed advertising aesthetics and its politics. Artists like Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, and Richard Prince, were at the forefront, often appropriating their material directly from adverts.

Their approach quickly spread across the country and abroad. ‘What began as satire quickly grew to become a defining moment in contemporary art,’ says Gianni Jetzer, curator of ‘Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s’, at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC – an exhibition exploring art and artists’ relationship to commodity and commerce. Focusing on works made in the 1980s by more than 70 artists, the show serves up a slice of eighties ideology on a plate of trenchant criticism of the socio-economic system.

Many of them haven’t lost their acuity. Thirty years after it originally appeared in 1988, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s iconic, 68ft projection onto the façade (pictured below) of the Hirshhorn Museum is being restaged. The work, the artist reflects, is ‘strangely familiar and at once unbearably relevant’. In it, imagery spliced from ads, films and newspaper headlines in the US at the time – abortion and death penalty laws – floats imposingly above visitors’ heads, a comment on way mass media manipulates us all.

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, 1988, by Krzysztof Wodiczko, public projection on the façade of the museum. The installation has been recreated for the 2018 exhibition. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York

It was also in the 1980s that artists, perhaps for the first time, had to face up to the place of their art as part of a market; the physical art object was now something to acquire and own, with buyers lusting for next big thing.

Though this movement defined, in many ways, the way artists work today, (see the new Netflix exposé of the art world, Blurred Lines, for proof). ‘This phenomenon of artist as a brand identity, and the art object as commodity, has not yet been examined at this scale,’ Jetzer notes.

INFORMATION

‘Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s’ is on view until 13 May. For more information, visit the Hirshorn Museum 

website

ADDRESS

Hirshhorn Museum
Independence Avenue and 7th Street
Washington DC 20560

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This month marks Wallpaper’s coming of age: our 21st anniversary. It’s also my tenth year as editor-in-chief, having switched from being creative director in April 2007. I must confess that my coming of age came a number of years earlier. Time flies.

One of the earliest projects I worked on in my new role was our inaugural October Guest Editors’ Issue. Now, many media outlets have given over their editorial reins to appropriate talents in order to bring a fresh perspective and generate some PR buzz. But because of Wallpaper’s multi-faceted editorial remit, we felt our spin on the concept should be equally all-encompassing – we would invite not just one, but up to three diverse creatives each year who would reflect our offering, but also push us to try new things.

So year one saw a purist industrial designer, Dieter Rams, an iconoclastic artist, Jeff Koons, and a much-more-than-a-fashion-designer fashion designer, Hedi Slimane. To rebalance the unintentional male bias for 2007, the next year saw Louise Bourgeois, Zaha Hadid and Rei Kawakubo bring art, architecture, and fashion girl power to our pages. Subsequent editions have seen Karl Lagerfeld, Philippe Starck, David Lynch, Robert Wilson, Kraftwerk, Christian Marclay, Lang Lang, Ole Scheeren, Taryn Simon, Laurie Simmons, Elmgreen & Dragset, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, William Wegman and Liz Diller have fun at our expense. That makes 21 in total, and therefore a convenient excuse to take a retrospective look, as well as request some updates for our latest issue. (Our thickest issue yet, the spine also happens to measure a serendipitous 21mm)

In addition to a 20-plus page section within the magazine, each of our Guest Editors was also invited to design a cover. Many called for unusual paper technologies – Hedi used specialist printing inks to simulate glitter, whereas Karl invited readers to strip the Dior Homme suit off his muse by means of a peelable layer. Starck constructed a transparent front cover using three layers of tracing paper. And Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter tacked on a pair of 3D specs, to go with his 3D cover portrait and portfolio of exclusive images tied to key Kraftwerk compositions.

If I had to pick one favourite project it would be Zaha’s. Her cover was a gatefold construction using multiple die-cuts, while inside she produced a 16-page die-cut sculpture, which was a take on her ‘Lotus’ room installation at that year’s Venice Biennale. ‘I want to put a big hole in the magazine’, she told us. We dutifully obliged.

Zaha was profiled by art critic Matthew Collings, who visited her at her London offices and provided a pleasant distraction from discussions about cement. Collings and ‘Big Z’, as he affectionately called her, hit it off immediately. ‘Her architecture is the greatest art of the moment,’ he said.

So it’s a huge pleasure for me and I think a fitting tribute to Zaha (who tragically passed away 18 months ago) that this anniversary issue’s cover was created by Zaha Hadid Architects and its principal and torchbearer, Patrik Schumacher.

Enjoy this special issue and raise a glass to Big Z.

Tony Chambers, Editor-in-Chief

As originally featured in the October 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*223)

Our thickest issue yet, the spine also happens to measure a serendipitous 21mm, in keeping with our celebration of 21 years, and 21 guest editors

INFORMATION

The October 2017 issue of Wallpaper* is out now. Subscribe here

A time-travelling monk leaves a dramatic mountainous setting in what appears to be ancient China. He sets off by foot, walking through time toward a nameless megacity. With a composed expression and dressed in traditional costume, we see him pass by fragments of modern China – mass construction of soulless high rises, super highways with endless traffic, giant advertising billboards, a factory car park with row upon row of identical cars. He approaches a black racecar, puts on a virtual reality headset and enters the future, projecting dazzling, dancing lights onto the vehicle.

Unmanned is the video-art prelude to BMW Art Car #18 by multimedia artist Cao Fei, unveiled in Beijing at the Minsheng Art Museum. Following the video, an M6 GT3 racecar appears on stage cloaked in a deep matt carbon black. The audience aim their smartphones at the number 18 on the car, and through a special app project colourful light swishes onto its surface.

There are three layers to this latest Art Car: Unmanned, the racecar and a free app that employs both virtual and augmented reality. The idea is to experience these elements simultaneously for a theatrical experience as the light swishes form an AR installation floating above and around the car. Here we, the audience, are active participants. This is art as experience.

Cao is one of China’s most notable contemporary artists. Following the contributions by Jeff Koons and John Baldessari, at 39 she is also the youngest and first Chinese artist to be involved in the 42-year-old series. The unique BMW Art Car project began life quite innocently when racing driver Hervé Poulain asked his artist friend Alexander Calder to paint his 3.0 CSL which he subsequently raced at Le Mans. Since, some of the most notable names in art history have painted BMW racecars, with all but Olafur Eliasson’s competing on the international racing scene.

A decade ago the Icelandic artist made an ecological statement by taking the wheels of his Art Car. Yet no artist has attempted to take this into virtual space – until now. Cao’s project can be read as a statement on the second life of the automobile – the clean, multi-functioning, digitalised, autonomous vehicle. Simultaneously, she is narrating the dazzling speed of change in China.

The artists who work on the Art Cars have complete creative freedom, but as these are functioning racecars, they cannot interfere with the body shape or weight. In Cao’s case the challenge was to find a surface that would work with AR technology, and the only way this could function effectively is on a flat matt colour as reflective surfaces tend not respond to the algorithm. She explains, ‘I needed the darkness shade so when the colour appears with the AR you only see the shadow of the car.’

Cao was chosen by an independent jury that includes some of the world’s most notable gallery directors and curators, and it took some convincing the BMW board members in Munich to take a risk. ‘It wasn’t easy for BMW to go ahead with this car,’ admits Thomas Girst, head of BMW Group cultural engagement. The jury though were unanimously in favour of this rising star. ‘She is a very courageous choice because of her capacity to make parallel universes,’ offers Richard Armstrong, director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The BMW Art Car #18 has taken three years from initial concept, during which time Cao has had a racing experience and visited the BMW headquarters, working closely with the engineers, designers and digital specialists. A virtual experience will be on display during Art Basel this week. Then in November, BMW racing driver Augusto Farfus will take the M6 GT3 on the track at FIA GT World Cup in Macau. How Cao’s virtual and augmented vision will play out on the race track, when the car zooms by at high-speed, is something we are told the team will work on perfecting by then.

The following day we visit the artist’s studio in Beijing. She has occupied an abandoned 1950s cinema complex since 2015, painstakingly restoring many of its original features. This and the surrounding neighbourhood are relics from the Soviet Union and later German Democratic Republic’s involvement with China as part of the Five-Year Plan. Sadly, the area, once considered a utopian vision, is being demolished in a couple of years to make way for more high-rises, the kind that occupy Beijing’s skyline.

Cao is very much from the digital age. She has a prominent presence in Second Life and says to her the machine ‘is like human’. You can sense her comfort within the virtual world as she speaks passionately about technology, of using virtuality to imagine another reality. ‘When looking at the boundaries between the virtual and real world my answer is light, something visible and something invisible,’ she says. ‘To me, light represents thoughts. As the speed of thoughts cannot be measured, the Art Car questions the existence of the boundaries of the human mind.’

Her is a mix of old and new customs and philosophies. For instance, in Unmanned the practitioner executes spiritual movements, which echo in colourful streams of light. When the monk performs his dance, Cao is paying tribute to the traditional Asian spiritual ceremony when a new object is blessed – here the racecar and driver. She says the light elements mirror what the eyes cannot see and the mind may not be able to picture. When the AR app is projected on the car, a similar experience is meant to happen.

She offers: ‘We are entering a new age, where the mind directly controls objects and where thoughts can be transferred, such as unmanned operations and artificial intelligence. Which attitudes and temperaments hold the key to opening the gateway to the new age?’

Cao is from a generation born into a modern China. Her father was a prominent socialist realist sculptor who created busts of heroes and political figures, and his daughter often accompanied him to revolutionary gatherings. She speaks fondly of the experience. In contrast, she was raised in Guangzhou, a city close to Hong Kong and one of the first to experience change in 1980s. She admits her work takes a great deal from witnessing China’s rapid development, first as a child then when she moved to Beijing over a decade ago.

Cao admits that these many layers and contradictions have helped inform her work. Aware of the disconnection from the past, she will now spend time investigating the country’s immediate history – the 1950s and 60s. Although on the whole artists here are left undisturbed by the government, Cao admits there are always constraints – from not being able to log onto social media, to the banning of Google, but that ‘swimming along’ is a Chinese skill.

She offers: ‘My father was expressing the idea of restrictions within restrictions. For me virtuality is a means to express myself, to understand reality which is what I’m interested in. I use writing and film too, but we are living in an age of rapid technology and in this context, we need to know that virtuality has changed the way reality works. And to do this we need to be part of it.’

Much like the city she works in, Cao’s work is interjected with slogans that are political but also about advertising and high-consumerism. ‘I used to do advertising where you have to first catch the eye of the consumer to then draw them in,’ she says. ‘Here I want to convey a message to the younger generation by using an app. This kind of interaction is crucial for me.’

The vehicle for mass consumption is relatively new in China and there is little historical connection to the romance of the motor car here. Perhaps it is this lack of emotional context that allows an artist like Cao Fei, who doesn’t hold a driving licence, to so breezily visualise the vehicle in its next digitalised, autonomous life. China’s dazzling development, whereby city maps are reconfigured every six months or so, leaves little time for contemplation.

With BMW hoping to evolve into a technology firm, exploring cars that are advanced mobile tech gadgets, we ask the artist if she is aware that her project is expressing this vision? She contemplates this question for some time, then offers, ‘Today, it isn’t enough to use a brush to paint – we need to go beyond aesthetic values. The monk in the film is travelling from past to the future through different spaces. It is about past, present and future, but also reality and virtuality. Image can give energy to cars because this kind of energy cannot be expressed in language. These images can showcase our vision for the future automobile.’

INFORMATION
The BMW Art Car #18 will be on view at Art Basel from 15 – 18 June. For more information, visit the BMW Art Car website

Louis Vuitton unveils a new collaboration with Jeff Koons

In February, Louis Vuitton presented its A/W 2017 collection in the Louvre’s breathtaking Cour Marly, a space which houses sculptures from the 17th and 18th century, originally commissioned for the gardens of Louis XIV’s Château de Marly countryside home. As the models, dressed in leather motorcross jackets and silk dresses, walked alongside bronze and marble statues, the Parisian house fused the contemporary with the classic in a new dialogue between fashion and art.

This is a conversation continued further in Louis Vuitton’s new collaboration with artist Jeff Koons, which sees imagery from his Gazing Ball paintings – hand-painted reproductions of works by the Old Masters, from Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503) to Titian’s Mars, Venus, and Cupid (after 1546) – reimagined in a collection of bags and accessories. The collection will be unveiled at a dinner tonight at the Louvre Museum, hosted by Jean-Luc Martinez, the president-director of the Louvre, who we spoke to recently for our April 2017 issue (W*217) about the opening of its Abu Dhabi gallery later this year.

In a collection that weaves a host of different lineages – the art canon, Koons’ own career and the heritage of Louis Vuitton – visuals from the artist’s 2013 series have been transposed onto a selection of the Parisian label’s signature bag silhouettes, including the Speedy, the Keepall and the Neverfull. The names of artists, including Van Gogh, Rubens and Fragonard, is also emblazoned in block capitals on their respective artworks.

‘What the Gazing Ball series of paintings is really about is communicating how when you give it up to something else, when you find something of greater interest outside yourself, you’re able to achieve transcendence and have a life with greater breadth to it,’ Koons explains. ‘If we want to achieve transcendence, we are able to look at even the simplest thing outside ourselves, or the most complex, and find awe and wonderment in that. And our parameters expand.’

Vuitton’s parameters have expanded too. Since 2001, artists have been asked to rework its signature Monogram, like Stephen Sprouse, who graffitied over it in bold colours, and Richard Prince, who overlaid it with screen printings in the style of his canvases. For the first time, Koons has modifed the typography of the Monogram, and it bears his own initials. Layering multiple biographies, the bag’s outer bears a tag in the shape of an inflatable rabbit, a motif of Koons’ career, while its inner features a biography and portrait of the Master whose work has been referenced.

The paintings in Koons’ Gazing Ball series feature a single, blue mirrored sphere, a popular feature piece in American suburban gardens. The orb reflects the viewer, creating a link between the artist and audience, inviting self-reflection. Louis Vuitton's Masters collection once again encourages a narrative, a new history being chartered between owner, Koons and the Old Master that they feel the greatest emotional and aesthetic connection to.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Louis Vuitton website

Dubbed the 'first celebrity artist' and having already seen a full retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum, one wonders what commodity-broker-turned-art pioneer Jeff Koons has left to achieve. The goal now, in the artist's own surprising words, is 'to reach a state of complete self-acceptance'.

With the inauguration of a new exhibition at close friend Almine Rech's Mayfair outpost, this philosophy is given the space to breathe and develop. The self-titled show consists of two majestic ballerina ready-mades from Koons' Antiquity series, framed by a group of technically exacting reproductions of Western masterpieces, created with the help of computer algorithms in Koons' New York studio. They include Old Master paintings such as Giotto's The Kiss of Judas, Titian’s Pastoral Concert and Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way. On how he chose these particular pieces, Koons explains that they have all profoundly influenced his work. Some of them, he feels, have moved him to the extent that they have biologically altered his DNA. Outlandish, maybe, but he says it with such passion and integrity, that it's easy to believe him.

In front of these imposing, oil-based works, Koons has placed a series of hand-blown blue globes, rendered in a similar glowing finish to the ballerinas, providing a continuity and narrative that unites the show. Within these mirrored Gazing Balls, 'the painting is reflected, and you’re reflected into it – you become part of the painting, it takes you back in time'. They're not just 'shiny' for the sake of it, and they're not arbitrarily placed – there is real, conceptual purpose to them that belies their initial, comical appearance.

The reflective Gazing Ball paintings promote Koons' idea of 'linkage' between the audience and artwork that is so central to his practice. As he's been saying throughout his career, 'the viewer completes the work'. He goes on to explain that seeing ourselves within the image helps us to understand our place within the world. It affirms our small existence in the grand scale of things. 'Really, this show celebrates giving it up to things outside yourself, things greater than yourself.'

And it works. Standing in Almine Rech's pristine new space, among these handsomely reproduced masterpieces, and standing before Koons himself, one is humbled. The artist's coveted brand of 'self-acceptance', however, might be a little way off yet. Especially when Koons reveals that the only man ever to have truly achieved it is Picasso – his artistic hero. 'I feel that when an individual is able to have self-acceptance as Picasso did in his late 80s, then you’re able to move outward, outside yourself, which eventually leads you to the acceptance of others. This is the highest state. A state that art can take you to.'

INFORMATION

’Jeff Koons’ is on view until 21 January 2017. For more information, visit the Almine Rech website

ADDRESS

Almine Rech
Grosvenor Hill
Broadbent House
London, W1K 3JH

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If New Yorkers ‘love’ Times Square it's well-concealed, and more akin to the love/hate theme of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. Anyone who has fought through umbrella-wielding masses as part of their daily commute (dodging ‘naked’ cowboys and shaggy Sesame Street characters) has felt sufficiently defeated err tamed.

And yet, there is a certain magic to this neon square in the city's first snow, or through the eyes of someone seeing it for the first time. It is this Times Square that Collective-LOK recently paid tribute to with their Valentine's Day installation 'Heart of Hearts'.

The reflective pavilion, a band of 12 ten-foot hearts, was the winner of the annual Times Square Valentine Heart Design competition. Among the design's uber-Instagrammable inspirations are works by Jeff Koons and Anish Kapoor.

‘Some of the architectural themes that these precedents bring about for us are reflection, repetition... degrees of privacy and publicity,’ says William O'Brien Jr (Rome Prize Fellowship in Architecture winner, and Associate Professor in the MIT Department of Architecture) who leads the designcollective along with Michael Kubo and Jon Lott.

He adds that ‘the connotations to the sacred’ of the ring shape are inherent (despite whatever urban profanity occurs around it.) 

What set this design apart in the competition was the ability to create intimate spaces while still being open. Every second heart in the ring was four-sided, creating a shield within the chaos to capture a kiss – or maybe just that perfect selfie. 

Scott Rothkopf, curator of the Whitney museum and co-curator of Jeff Koons: A Retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao, says he remembers an 'embarrassing' photo of himself in shorts and sandals taken years ago in front of Puppy, Koons' giant floral canine on the Bilbao waterfront. And who hasn't, on a summer city break, been snapped doing jazz hands beside Puppy or Balloon Dog or Popeye?

Yet few of us, Rothkopf included, might have predicted these larger-than-life statuettes would gain widespread critical in our time. Or that Koons would transcend to international treasure from the artist who cost too much, partied too much and shared way too much.

At least that is what this monumental show - third in a travelling suite that included the Whitney Museum of Art and the Centre George Pompidou - seems to suggest.

The sheer scope of the exhibition - from the artist's heady early days down, quite literally via spiral staircase, to his more recent work on the main floor - illustrates an artist constantly working, thinking, pushing, tempting. His is the classic short man's desire to bring people together in a so-called 'Dionysian festival' of viewership.

Frank Gehry's multifaceted Guggenheim building is the venue for it. As Koons said ahead of the opening on Monday, 'I've never seen my work look more elegant than here. Within this architecture the works take on a comfortable aspect.' You could hardly disagree.

Over more than a year on tour, Koons, has had time to reflect on his four decades exploring new and expressive forms in art. He speaks like a man who is at peace with his message and medium, spouting affirmations like a proper 12-stepper drinking the Jeff Koons Kool-Aid. 'Once you have self-acceptance,' he says, 'you reach a higher stage of acceptance of others. Trust in yourself in order to achieve your potential.' If he's had any weakness, 'it's been not accessing my highest state of consciousness.'

The overarching theme of Jeff Koons: A Retrospective is reflection - of the self and the environment. From an early age accompanying his father to the family's interior decoration store, Koons has thought about the power of reflection to affect how we feel. His most effective works use the power of reflection to entice, then invite further reflection on our feelings of love and disdain, internal and external, luxury and kitsch, modernism and the Baroque.

The latest works pair gargantuan plaster casts with mirrored blue 'gazing balls', ornaments that enjoyed popularity in the 1500s before popping up again in the residential gardens of America. 'They have a generosity that reflects you, affirms you,' says Koons.

Rothkopf announces a 'surprise' through every doorway in Gehry's unpredictable building. No surprises here, just the inexorable quest for perfection, the desire to please, what Rothkopf rightly calls 'the finger-in-socket, sugar-jolt of pop art'.

At 60, Koons is back at work, investigating new and expressive forms in marble and granite. He's not close to being done, retrospective or no. I'm with Rothkopf when he says, 'I look forward to the sequel.'

ADDRESS

Avenida Abandoibarra, 2
48009
Bilbao, Spain

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Art Basel swept into Hong Kong this week sparking a creativity frenzy that spread well beyond the 233 galleries showing in the city’s monolithic convention centre as everyone from up-and-coming young local designers to international galleries and fashion designers jumped on for the ride.

The winners were the public, who were treated to a series of world-class public installations in shopping centres across the city including Zhu Jinshi’s ‘Boat’, an intricate 15x3.5x4.2 metre immersive installation crafted from 10,000 sheets of Xuan paper, presented in Exchange Square.  At Central’s Landmark mall, local art collector and architect William Lim’s suspended plexiglass dome displayed nine important artworks valued at over US$ 19 million including a mesmerising portrait by Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi, while a set of telescopes enabling closer inspection of the works reflected on how contemporary art is viewed.

Across the harbour, the Peninsula Hotel turned tradition on its head with British sculptor Richard Wilson’s full-sized replica of a vintage twin-axel Harrington Legionnaire coach teetering rather alarmingly on the edge of the hotel’s 7th floor terrace. The installation, titled ‘Hang On A Minute Lads…I’ve Got A Great Idea’, replicated the final scene of the iconic film, The Italian Job.

Nearby, the city’s tallest building, the International Commerce Centre, exhibited Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei’s ‘Same Old, Brand New’ light show. Drawing inspiration from 1980s video games, images from Pac-Man and Tetris were projected onto the skyscraper’s futuristic façade.  A smartphone app allowed viewers to hear music while watching.

The city’s growing number of art galleries also upped their game with a stellar showing of works from French graffiti artist and photographer JR who exhibited several ethereal new pieces titled ‘Ghosts of Ellis Island’ at Galerie Perrotin, to Duddell’s ‘ICA Off-Site: Hong Kongese’ that reflected on the pace of urbanisation with a range of works including Shinro Ohtake’s intricate ‘Time Memory’ collage, Zeng Hong’s ‘Balcony’, and a miniature replica of Millie’s Centre Neon Sign courtesy of the M+ visual arts museum.

Meanwhile, in the rapidly gentrifying Sheung Wan district, Pearl Lam’s newest gallery dedicated to emerging artists unveiled an intriguing collection of architectural beeswax installations by the young Beijing artist, Ren Ri.  The beekeeper-artist ‘collaborates’ with bees, manipulating the formation of honeycombs to create organic sculptures and intricate maps of the world.

On the opposite side of Hong Kong island, one of Hong Kong’s strongest alternative art institutions Para Site opened a larger new space in Quarry Bay with ‘One Hundred Years of Shame – Songs of Resistance and Scenarios for Chinese Nations’.  Works include Huang Xiaopeng’s ‘When Harry Met Sally’ light box artwork and Firenze Lai’s hauntingly beautiful ‘Human Chain’ painting.

One of the strongest showings in town, however, was at the Tod Williams and Billie Tsien-designed Asia Society in Admiralty, where Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara’s ‘Life is Only One’ retrospective of paintings, sketches, photographs and installations offered a fascinating glimpse into the notoriously shy artist’s world.

A new satellite event - Art Central - also appeared on the scene this year, targeting a younger crowd with works like Stella Zhang’s all-white hand-sewn space installation for Galerie du Monde and Chinese ink painter Lan Zhenghui’s monumental paintings. The 10,000 square meter harbourfront tent designed by London-based architecture firm Stiff & Trevillion-designed was also home to local architect Joyce Wang’s ultra contemporary take on the traditional crystal chandelier for Swarovski.

Back at Art Basel, now under the direction of Adeline Ooi, visitors found the usual list of big-hitting names such as Anish Kapoor and Grayson Perry, whose ‘Comfort Blanket’ tapestry generated considerable interest on opening night. David Zwirner Gallery, which presented a polychromed wood sculpture of Buster Keaton by Jeff Koons, and several enigmatic paintings by surrealist-realist painter Neo Rauch, also reported very strong sales.

This year, the Fair’s expanded Encounters Sector benefitted significantly from curation by Melbourne art expert Alexie Glass-Kantor who introduced 20 large-scale installations from 14 countries. The most noteworthy was Hong Kong-based artist Joao Vasco Paiva’s ‘Mausoleum’, a 5.6-metre tall installation of ubiquitous marketplace Styrofoam boxes cast in stone resin.

On the VIP Lounge front, Art Basel lead partner UBS went beyond providing a comfortable refuge, exhibiting an eclectic mix of works by Haegue Yang and Wilson Shieh alongside David Hockney, Andy Warhol and Gilbert and George, reinforcing the strong Japanese and Korean presence this year.

Sculptural highlights included young Korean artist Myeongbeom Kim's striking deer and Paolo Pivi’s shocking pink-feathered polar bear.  The ultimate crowd-pleaser, however, proved to be Japanese artist Shintaro Miyake who, perched on a Sori Yanagi-designed Elephant Stool, treated visitors to a live wall drawing performance.

'Millie's Centre Neon Sign (miniature replica)' was another highlight at Duddell's. Courtesy of M+, West Kowloon Cultural District

ADDRESS

Art Basel Hong Kong 2015 was at the Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre, 1 Expo Drive, Wan Chai, Hong Kong

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The arrival of the Phillips auction house at 30 Berkeley Square confirms Mayfair's emergence as the art market's prime pitch. And with Caruso St John currently working up plans for Larry Gagosian's mammoth new gallery round the corner on Grosvenor Hill, Mayfair's top spot looks beyond dispute.

The auction house's new European HQ, with a double-height shopfront facing onto Mount Street and Berkeley Square itself, is also an acknowledgment that art and collectible design are now as much luxury goodies as the Céline robes or Balenciaga bags available across the road. Opening the new showroom last week, Ed Dolman – appointed Phillips' chairman and chief executive in July, after three years at the Qatar Museums Authority and 27 at Christie's before that – called it part of the 'contemporary luxury landscape'.

Bankrolled by Mercury, the Russian luxury-goods group, Phillips has decamped from its base at Howick Place in Victoria – an area that, ironically, now boasts a cluster of fashion-brand HQs but is perhaps off the map as far as international art collectors are concerned. The new Berkeley Square space is a suitably luxurious 31,000 square feet.

This new base of operations, designed by architects Aukett Swanke, has vaulted exhibition spaces on the ground floor and lower ground floor with further exhibition space on the first and sixth floors (which also features a café and terraces).

Phillips has drafted in Italian curator Francesco Bonami to ensure the showroom opens in spectacular fashion and make clear what is possible in the voluminous new space. His exhibition, 'A Very Short History of Contmporary Sculpture', includes 33 works by Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Jeff Koons, Rachel Whiteread, Richard Prince, Matthew Barney, Sol LeWitt and Anthony Caro, among others – all given space to shine and catch the eye of passers-by. Only two of the works, however, are for sale, further 'blurring the boundaries between gallery, auction house and museum', as Bonami says.

The gallery on the lower ground floor has been given over to a preview of the inaugural evening sale on 15 October, with works by Kippenberger, Kiefer, Kapoor, Richter, Koons and Warhol – as well as from younger artists on the rise, including Tauba Auerbach, Sterling Ruby and Wyatt Kahn. The sixth-floor gallery is previewing the 16 October day sale, while Phillips' worldwide design director Alex Payne is building buzz around his December design sale in New York by sneaking five Carlo Mollino pieces into the lobby. Payne is also looking forward to making the most of Phillips' new London home with plans to install a Prouvé prefab on the ground floor before April's design sale.

ADDRESS

30 Berkeley Square
London W1J 6EX

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Giddiness is rarely associated with Brutalist architecture, but it might well be the sensation by which the Whitney Museum's Marcel Breuer-designed home is remembered - thanks to Jeff Koons. The former Wallpaper* guest editor and artist's vast retrospective, which opens to the public on Friday, occupies nearly every available floor, wall, and nook of the museum (approximately 2,500 sq m) and is an exuberant farewell to the 1966 Breuer Building as the Whitney prepares to move into its new space in downtown New York, designed by Renzo Piano. 'We wanted to say goodbye with a flourish,' says Adam Weinberg, director of the Whitney.

Born in Pennsylvania, Koons, 59, has lived and worked in Manhattan since 1976, but this marks his first large-scale museum presentation in New York. The challenge for the Whitney was to mount a show that would encourage visitors to look anew at the work of a celebrity artist who has simultaneously exploded and been reduced to a global cultural shorthand of stunning auction prices and gleaming, chromium steel balloon animals. ('Jeff, what are you wearing?' implored one attendee at Tuesday's press preview. Answer: Dior Homme.)

'We're at a distance now that we can assess some of these kind of mythic objects with a different perspective,' says Whitney curator Scott Rothkopf, who has spent the last five years organising the retrospective. 'I think it will be very surprising for people to see some of Jeff's most famous icons, like the Balloon Dog or Michael Jackson and Bubbles and the Rabbit, in the context of the works from which they emerged and within these series that are extremely complex in their subject matter and in their ways of making.'

Organised chronologically, the show traces Koons' multifaceted output from 1978 to works that were completed last week. New connections within and among the delineated series - such as 'Inflatables', 'Luxury & Degradation', and 'Easyfun' - click into place as one moves from room to room. A very early assemblage of coloured sponges scattered among mirrors reveals itself as a precursor to the bright and obsessively engineered forms that came decades later. The 'Banality' sculptures take a turn for the sinister when viewed together and in the round, a recurring moustache motif evokes Dali and Duchamp.

The restrospective's masterstroke is its ascension from past to present through the three main floors, so that the scale of the work grows with the building's floor plate. The drama gradually builds to a full swing celebration on the fourth floor. There are balloons, including a giant pink one affixed to the wall in an Anish Kapoor-goes-to-the-party-store moment; cake (a painted slice that stands about three metres tall); and 'Play-Doh' (2014), a massive mound of multicoloured modelling clay that Koons has been working for more than two decades to realise, eventually turning to 27 pieces of interlocking aluminium to replicate what he describes as 'a very joyous, very pop material'.

And Koons is not done yet. 'I believe completely in the work that we have here, and I hope that other people can find meaning in it, but for myself I really feel that it's about the future,' says the artist, speaking with characteristic ebullience. 'I believe that I have another at least three decades - I hope even more - to create art, and truly to be able to exercise the freedom that we all have as individuals to do exactly what we want.'

ADDRESS

Whitney Museum
945 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10021

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Inflatable Swiss chalets, huge easter eggs and bare-breasted women beating resin blocks in a public park. It's the first week of December, and once again in Miami, the art fair has come to town, with this year activities neatly bookended in the north of the city by a show at MOCA of Tracey Emin's neon works - 67 created over 20 years - called Angel Without You and in the south by a retrospective exhibition of Ai Weiwei's work at the newly opened, Herzog & de Meuron-designed Pérez Art Museum.

Emin's archive of chaotically scrawled and spelt slogans - in a lofty blacked-out space - read like illuminated scribblings on a toilet wall. From inanities such as 'Is Legal Sex Anal?' and 'Is Anal Sex Legal?', to moments of beauty ('Love happens - like lightning') and self-knowledge ('I know, I know, I know' - crossed out three times), it's Emin in her best light.

Weiwei's politics often focus on the billions of Chinese who labour thanklessly in the creation of their country. At PAMM an enormous sculpture made of shiny metal bicycle wheels (a nod to both Duchamp and the only transport available to many working Chinese) has the feel of a war memorial for workers, recognising all those subjugated by the system.

Between these two poles, the business of the fair has gone along briskly, dealers having upped their game with some fighting work. (Miami is no longer the funsome little sister of June's Art Basel but a more serious player in its own right, particularly with its geographical attraction for the Latin American market.)

Gagosian's big gun is the Jeff Koons showstopper 'Baroque Egg with Bow', in scintillating turquoise and hot pink (1994-2008), a massive bundle of symbolism (from new birth to a stealthy restraint, suggested by the big bravura ribbon). At Sadie Coles, Sarah Lucas's 'Tit' chair (2012) - entirely 'upholstered' in stuffed stockings that pop up like perky breasts - is a ribald piece of feminism, poking particularly apposite fun at a Miami audience, where enhancements come as standard. And at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, Martin Creed has constructed an elegant pyramid of bog-standard toilet rolls. It isn't ironic - more an act of transformation of this prerequisite of contemporary life into a perfect architectural component.

Other ways to get noticed include the booth of Neugerriemschneider, which Jorge Pardo has turned into a lush domestic space, lined with cheap fabrics more usually used to make Mexican pinafores (Pardo, who is Cuban, now lives in Merida). Everything is for sale, while other artists' work is encased in the shelving system he has created around the outside of the stand. And at Marianne Boesky, Roxie Paine's massive moving neon piece of a man being knocked down and getting back up could hardly be missed. 'I think it's how artists feel everyday,' says Boesky.

Beyond the Convention Centre, projects take on a more expansive form. LA artist Ry Rocklen has created an art bar, sponsored by Absolut, turning a patch of ground by the W Hotel into a basketball court, filled with chess and ping pong tables created from trophies and trophy parts, a comment, perhaps on the winners and losers that an overly competitive art market now creates.
 
Another large-scale installation came in the inflatable form of a Swiss-style chalet. Perched over the water at the Miami Marina Stadium, its polyurethane skin gently heating in the Florida sun, it is the creation of French artist duo Kolkoz for Swiss watch company Audemar Piguet. 'We love clichés and we love Pop,' say the pair. Indeed.

If you want to see the way the Indian elite might one day live, the collector Shalini Passi's New Delhi home is a good place to start. For more than a decade, Passi has conducted a brilliantly curated, global tour of self-education: commissioning and collecting works of art, objects and furniture from auction houses, artists and fairs on four continents. And she has housed her collection in a remarkable space that is so much more than the sum of its parts.

To hear the extraordinary tale behind Passi's home, you'll have to turn to our May issue, but here, we take you on a tour.

'The spinach is the art,’ says Jeff Koons in a press conference this morning, attempting to explain his latest collection of work, the Popeye Series, which goes on show at the Serpentine gallery from Thursday 2nd July.

See more of Koons' works on show at London's Serpentine gallery

Whether the New York-based artist and former guest editor of Wallpaper*, is saying that art is a source of supernormal strength in general or merely to him is perhaps unclear in this statement, but either way, if this show is anything to go by, Koons is still going from strength to strength.

His first ever solo show in the UK in a public gallery, the exhibition is a combination of loans as well as some brand new pieces. Kitsch, bold, surreal and full of bizarre combinations of everyday objects, cartoon imagery, art-historical references and children’s toys, this is signature Koons – just the way we like it.

Inflatable toys, which have appeared in his work since the late 1970s, make an appearance once again, this time juxtaposed with everyday objects such as rubbish bins and plastic chairs. And while they bear an uncanny resemblance to the plastic toy they are based on, are in fact cast in aluminium and painted.

‘Inflatables are a symbol of optimism,’ he explains. ‘We are ourselves inflatables full of air. Every time we take a breath we show we are alive and when we exhale it is a symbol of death. Inflatables therefore are in a permanent state of optimism.’

The paintings are complex and layered compositions that combine disparate images both found and created by Koons, including most prominently the recognisable figures of Popeye and Olive Oyl. Apart from perhaps the fact that Popeye is a character conceived during the Great Depression and therefore a fitting character to rediscover and explore now, this show doesn’t break any current taboos or step on new ground, but when it comes to Koons, we wouldn't have it any other way.

ADDRESS

Kensington Gardens
London W2 3XA

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The inspired and potentially controversial juxtaposition of American mod pop iconography and ornate French classicism is the unlikely context for a new exhibition of large-scale work by New York artist Jeff Koons, being staged within the opulent rooms and manicured gardens of the Palace of Versailles.

Click here to see more of Jeff Koons' work

Koons’ sculptural installations are all about impact, exquisitely crafted extrapolations of the kitsch and the mundane. Through sheer scale they seem to demand monumental backdrops – the jagged Manhattan skyline behind a giant metal balloon dog on the roof garden at the Met (still up until the end of October), or the ornate gold gildings, crystal chandeliers and lofty frescoed ceilings of the state apartments once occupied by Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.

'A brief moment of madness, perhaps, but a risk worth taking,' in the words of the exhibition’s curators, and indeed the contrast is stark. Fifteen major works, one per room, occupy key spaces throughout the palace – from a giant lobster, modelled after an inflatable children’s toy hanging in Le salon de Mars, to the large vase of flowers in the Queen’s Apartments and the more than three-metre wide blue reflective ‘moon’ against a far wall in the legendary Hall of Mirrors.

Other well-known pieces on show include Rabbit, in shiny silver, another balloon dog in cerise, and Split Rocker, an oversized animal’s head created using tens of thousands of colourful flowers, situated outside in the Parterre de l’Orangerie.

More accustomed to the blank austerity of modern art museums, the clash of colour, style, size and era becomes as much a part of the viewer’s experience as the installations themselves. And despite the ostensible discordance, Versailles was, in its day, a place of over the top celebration, artistic decadence and vibrant creativity. By that standard Koons fits the bill perfectly. Marie-Antoinette might even have approved.

With the October issue of Wallpaper* issue going on sale around the globe from 13 September, we take a look at one of our special guest editors, the legendary artist that is Jeff Koons. Don't miss all three issues, guest-edited by Jeff Koons, Hedi Slimane and Dieter Rams.

Jeff Koons is the most written about artist in the world. He says so himself, he's not wrong and is proud of the fact. The interplay of art, of fame, celebrity, taste and money are Koons' concern. And like Warhol, his persona - blank, chilly and slightly chilling - frames his art (we can assure you though that Koons is none of these).

Born in Pennsylvania in 1955, by the age of eight Koons was copying old masters and selling them at his father's furniture store. By the early 1980s he was an art superstar. His breakthrough work was 1985's 'Three Ball 50/50 Tank', three basketballs floating in a tank, but he quickly moved towards a more extravagant conceptual pop style. He is famous for his balloon animals cast in highly polished stainless steel or porcelain or PVC, but perhaps best known for 'Michael Jackson and Bubbles' of 1988, a life-sized ceramic rendering of Jackson and his pet chimpanzee.

Koons works from his well-manned Chelsea super studio in New York - all his works are created by a team of 80-odd assistants or outsourced to European craftsmen. This summer he presented a new series of paintings 'Hulk Elvis', at the Gagosian gallery in London's Kings Cross. He is planning to suspend a full-scale 161-foot replica of a Baldwin locomotive above the entrance to Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Koons' edition of Wallpaper* includes an extraordinary 16-page artwork inspired by his passion for legendary rock band Led Zeppelin. He commissioned a leading cultural theorist to deconstruct the Zeppelin myth, and in conversation with Stella McCartney, discusses the nature of fame, becoming a brand, and ... vaginas. His cover is an original and controversial collectable work of art.

Speaking of his turn in the editor's chair he said, 'It's a pleasure to work with Wallpaper*. It's a great magazine that touches on so many areas of life and aesthetics.'