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Lot Essay
Jeff Koons’s Gazing Ball (Esquiline Venus) is a striking example from the artist’s iconic Gazing Ball series of sculptures created in 2013. Blending the readymade with art historical tradition, Koons here casts the canonical ancient Roman sculpture Esquiline Venus in plaster. The artist cheekily balances a blue gazing ball in a seemingly precarious position, teetering at the edge of the sculpture’s urn support. Working on this series, Koons came to a realization, noting how “with sculpture, you feel a constant polarity between the biological and Platonism. The sculpture also places an emphasis on form.” (quoted in B. Powers, “A Talk with Jeff Koons,” Art News, Spring 2016, p. 29). Fusing the classical past with the contemporary moment, Koons establishes a compelling commentary on temporality. As the Italian curator Francesco Bonami writes, “time in Koons’s work is eventually irrelevant. No apparent hierarchy exists in the timeline of his production. That’s why the Gazing Ball group of sculptures is blooming from several different places with no direct connection between them” (“A Kind of Blue,” in Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball, exh. cat., David Zwirner, New York, 2013, n.p.).
Koons created a special type of plaster to create his new series. His artistic intervention follows a noble history of imitatio, the imitation of ancient art, with artist’s including Michelangelo creating sculptural copies of Greek and Roman works. The Victorian era saw a renewed interest in copies, with thousands of plaster casts made to reproduce ancient art. Koons is just the latest artist interested in engaging with the art of the past, but in the present work he adds an absorbing new element to the millennia-old form. Koons notes of his gazing balls that they are “devices of connecting. I want to participate, I always just wanted to be involved in a dialogue with the avant-garde. This is my family, these are the artists I have interest in, the joy that has enriched my life. I enjoy participating in the dialogue and I want to being something to the table” (quoted in A. Needham, “Jeff Koons on His Gazing Ball Paintings: ‘It’s not about copying,” the Guardian, 9 November 2015, online [accessed” 4/17/2026]).
Relating the Gazing Ball series to the optical design of Hadrian’s Villa, Bonami elucidates how, “in Koons’s new body of work, the sculptures have become recipients of the blue bubbles that looks like they could have been raised out of Canopus’s waters like a crowd of magical fairies or perhaps like isolated fireflies invading the hills outside ancient Rome on a summer’s night” (F. Bonami, op. cit.). Koons considers the head of his important earlier sculpture Rabbit to be the original gazing ball. His adoption of the gazing ball motif mirrors the Duchampian readymade: “the gazing ball is like Duchamp’s urinal in that it’s a confrontational object, but it’s also very retinal” the artist notes (ibid.). With its addition to the present work, Koons reframes the focus of the piece away from the form itself and towards the environment within which the work resides, incorporating his audience into the artwork itself. While the gazing ball “represents the vastness of the universe and at the same time the intimacy of right here, right now,” the sculptural cast of Esquiline Venus does not intend to replicate the visual experience of seeing the original, held in the Capitoline Museums in Rome, and instead represents a conceptual embodiment of antiquity’s essence (ibid.).
The original Esquiline Venus was first unearthed in Rome in 1874, as the ancient city was being renovated after becoming the capital of the modern Italian state. While the true subject of the work is not known, the work is either a representation of the Greco-Roman goddess Venus or the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra. It is thought to represent an example of the eclectic Neo-attic style of around the first century CE, which itself sought to imitate the previous style of Attic Greece several centuries earlier. Immediately after being unearthed, the work attracted the gaze of artists, including the celebrated painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, whose painting A Sculptor’s Model, completed in 1877, recreates the sculptural form of the Esquiline Venus into a painted figure. Another painter, Edward Poynter, also adapted the ancient sculpture for his painting Diadumenè (1884, Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter), which shows the Venus figure in a bathhouse near a reflecting pool. The reflective image inspired the Capitoline Museums to install the original Esquiline Venus next to a reflecting pool, anticipating Koons’s artistic intervention.
Gazing Ball (Esquiline Venus) creates a fascinating view into Jeff Koons’s deep art historical knowledge as he innovates upon the notion of the readymade, appropriating canonical subjects in the tradition of Duchamp while interpreting the experience of his viewer through cannily placed reflections. “The experience is about you, your desires, your participation, your relationship with the image” (J. Koons, quoted in ibid.).
Koons created a special type of plaster to create his new series. His artistic intervention follows a noble history of imitatio, the imitation of ancient art, with artist’s including Michelangelo creating sculptural copies of Greek and Roman works. The Victorian era saw a renewed interest in copies, with thousands of plaster casts made to reproduce ancient art. Koons is just the latest artist interested in engaging with the art of the past, but in the present work he adds an absorbing new element to the millennia-old form. Koons notes of his gazing balls that they are “devices of connecting. I want to participate, I always just wanted to be involved in a dialogue with the avant-garde. This is my family, these are the artists I have interest in, the joy that has enriched my life. I enjoy participating in the dialogue and I want to being something to the table” (quoted in A. Needham, “Jeff Koons on His Gazing Ball Paintings: ‘It’s not about copying,” the Guardian, 9 November 2015, online [accessed” 4/17/2026]).
Relating the Gazing Ball series to the optical design of Hadrian’s Villa, Bonami elucidates how, “in Koons’s new body of work, the sculptures have become recipients of the blue bubbles that looks like they could have been raised out of Canopus’s waters like a crowd of magical fairies or perhaps like isolated fireflies invading the hills outside ancient Rome on a summer’s night” (F. Bonami, op. cit.). Koons considers the head of his important earlier sculpture Rabbit to be the original gazing ball. His adoption of the gazing ball motif mirrors the Duchampian readymade: “the gazing ball is like Duchamp’s urinal in that it’s a confrontational object, but it’s also very retinal” the artist notes (ibid.). With its addition to the present work, Koons reframes the focus of the piece away from the form itself and towards the environment within which the work resides, incorporating his audience into the artwork itself. While the gazing ball “represents the vastness of the universe and at the same time the intimacy of right here, right now,” the sculptural cast of Esquiline Venus does not intend to replicate the visual experience of seeing the original, held in the Capitoline Museums in Rome, and instead represents a conceptual embodiment of antiquity’s essence (ibid.).
The original Esquiline Venus was first unearthed in Rome in 1874, as the ancient city was being renovated after becoming the capital of the modern Italian state. While the true subject of the work is not known, the work is either a representation of the Greco-Roman goddess Venus or the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra. It is thought to represent an example of the eclectic Neo-attic style of around the first century CE, which itself sought to imitate the previous style of Attic Greece several centuries earlier. Immediately after being unearthed, the work attracted the gaze of artists, including the celebrated painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, whose painting A Sculptor’s Model, completed in 1877, recreates the sculptural form of the Esquiline Venus into a painted figure. Another painter, Edward Poynter, also adapted the ancient sculpture for his painting Diadumenè (1884, Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter), which shows the Venus figure in a bathhouse near a reflecting pool. The reflective image inspired the Capitoline Museums to install the original Esquiline Venus next to a reflecting pool, anticipating Koons’s artistic intervention.
Gazing Ball (Esquiline Venus) creates a fascinating view into Jeff Koons’s deep art historical knowledge as he innovates upon the notion of the readymade, appropriating canonical subjects in the tradition of Duchamp while interpreting the experience of his viewer through cannily placed reflections. “The experience is about you, your desires, your participation, your relationship with the image” (J. Koons, quoted in ibid.).