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Lot Essay
A fertile bounty of lasciviously unfurling floral buds in full anthesis, Jeff Koons’s Wall Relief with Bird is an over life-size celebration of Edenic abundance. An important sculpture emerging from the artist’s notorious Made in Heaven series, the sculpture unifies motifs from Koons’s earliest sculptural works of 1979—his inflatable flowers and his wall-mounted appliances—to offer a vivid and tantalizing vision of his artistic universe. Jeff Koons alluringly describes how “in Wall Relief with Bird there is a bird pollinating these large flowers. The imagery to me is about penetration. It’s also about fertility and pollination, and the eternal” (J. Koons, quoted in M. Prather, “Interview with Jeff Koons,” in Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2012, p. 197). One of Koons’s most quintessential masterpieces, the present edition has been exhibited in the artist’s seminal surveys and retrospectives including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York as well as Tate Modern in London, while other editions of Wall Relief with Bird have been shown globally, from the Datar Museums in Doha, to Fondation Beyeler in Basel and the Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk.
Wall Relief with Bird is a high-relief polychrome wood sculpture with enticingly wrought veristic botanical and avian forms. Three voluptuous blossoming flowers align at the center of the composition—a yellow hibiscus at the top, followed by a white magnolia at the center with a delicate, pink daisy below. A blue hummingbird flutters around the central petal, its sharp beak just penetrating one of the flower’s anthers. Surrounding this central trio are several red and rose-colored flowers, all bound by grounding green leaves which surround the sculpture. Wall Relief with Bird was first exhibited alongside the other works in the Made in Heaven series, where “panting little dogs were displayed alongside Murano glass figurines of the newlyweds in flagrante and sculptures of carved flowers with humanoid orifices, some in the midst of pollination by a hummingbird’s long bill” (S. Rothkopf, “No Limits,” in Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2014, p. 25). This baroque spectacle functioned as a gesamtkunstwerk of painting and sculpture placing the viewer in the midst of an exuberant celebration of erotic passion between Koons and Ilona Staller, an Italian politician, model, and adult film star who married the artist the same year Made in Heaven was first exhibited.
The floral elements which dominate Wall Relief with Bird have had outsized significance as an enduring motif throughout Jeff Koons’s oeuvre, commencing with his first artworks, the Inflatables. As the artist relates, “I used to make inflatable flowers, back in 1979. They were store-bought inflatables. I inflated them, put them on glass mirrors, and just let them display themselves. When I was younger, seven, eight, nine, taking lessons, I drew flowers. But there’s a tension in flowers—and especially in the vases of flowers—about whether they’re domesticated or undomesticated. In a vase, the flowers are cut. Even though they’re a symbol, like the Garden of Eden, of life and sexuality and abundance, when you start to look at them in a philosophical way, there is actually no hope, no future” (J. Koons, quoted in ibid., p. 197). While embracing a Kierkegaardian interpretation of the flowers, Koons also emphasizes the buds’ positive potential: “I have always enjoyed flowers... I always like the sense that a flower just displays itself. The viewer always finds grace in a flower. Flowers are a symbol that life goes forward” (J. Koons, quoted in E. Geuna, “Jeff Koons Interviewed,” in Jeff Koons, exh. cat., Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Napoli, 2003, p. 157).
While his floral motifs emphasize the work’s stated themes of penetration, offering alluring orifices for the hummingbird’s beak to enter, Koons’s medium explores the theme of the eternal made explicit by the artist. Koons has elaborated how “wood is a material that churches have used a lot, therefore it is associated with spirituality. It is considered a living material” (J. Koons, quoted in ibid., p. 151). Koons had first started working with wood for Banality, the series prior to Made in Heaven, creating secular figurative sculptures which align with the baroque tradition of polychrome religious statuary. Koons had begun to explore the way the Catholic church employed art in European churches, developing a fascination for the Baroque and the Rococo while studying how religious art operated in institutional structures as a constant negotiation between object and worshiper. As the artist explains, “the church has used wood a lot to communicate to people that there’s a sense of continuation to life. It’s considered a living material, but it’s a seductive material. It has a certain sense of warmth” (J. Koons, quoted in M. Prather, op. cit., p. 196). The work operates like a religious altarpiece, aligning with what Renaissance art historian Alexander Nagel has written about Koons’s art: “Jeff Koons consecrates not just living beings but also ordinary things, and that is why when I look at his work I am always checking against the Christian relic cult” (A. Nagel, “Objects That Are Only Boundaries,” in Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, op. cit., p. 243).
Channeling the traditional usage of his medium in religious settings, Koons creates with Wall Relief with Bird a sensuous masterpiece communicating an almost spiritual sense of eternity, whilst simultaneously elaborating upon the penetrative, erotic aspects which pervade the broader Made in Heaven series. Jeff Koons is one of the most impactful artists alive today, his constantly reinventive creative world reinterprets Duchamp, Dada, Surrealism, and Pop art for the contemporary age. One of his most evocative and multifaceted works, Wall Relief with Bird insightfully provides an unvarnished look into the celebratory nature of procreation while rejoicing in the eternal.
Wall Relief with Bird is a high-relief polychrome wood sculpture with enticingly wrought veristic botanical and avian forms. Three voluptuous blossoming flowers align at the center of the composition—a yellow hibiscus at the top, followed by a white magnolia at the center with a delicate, pink daisy below. A blue hummingbird flutters around the central petal, its sharp beak just penetrating one of the flower’s anthers. Surrounding this central trio are several red and rose-colored flowers, all bound by grounding green leaves which surround the sculpture. Wall Relief with Bird was first exhibited alongside the other works in the Made in Heaven series, where “panting little dogs were displayed alongside Murano glass figurines of the newlyweds in flagrante and sculptures of carved flowers with humanoid orifices, some in the midst of pollination by a hummingbird’s long bill” (S. Rothkopf, “No Limits,” in Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2014, p. 25). This baroque spectacle functioned as a gesamtkunstwerk of painting and sculpture placing the viewer in the midst of an exuberant celebration of erotic passion between Koons and Ilona Staller, an Italian politician, model, and adult film star who married the artist the same year Made in Heaven was first exhibited.
The floral elements which dominate Wall Relief with Bird have had outsized significance as an enduring motif throughout Jeff Koons’s oeuvre, commencing with his first artworks, the Inflatables. As the artist relates, “I used to make inflatable flowers, back in 1979. They were store-bought inflatables. I inflated them, put them on glass mirrors, and just let them display themselves. When I was younger, seven, eight, nine, taking lessons, I drew flowers. But there’s a tension in flowers—and especially in the vases of flowers—about whether they’re domesticated or undomesticated. In a vase, the flowers are cut. Even though they’re a symbol, like the Garden of Eden, of life and sexuality and abundance, when you start to look at them in a philosophical way, there is actually no hope, no future” (J. Koons, quoted in ibid., p. 197). While embracing a Kierkegaardian interpretation of the flowers, Koons also emphasizes the buds’ positive potential: “I have always enjoyed flowers... I always like the sense that a flower just displays itself. The viewer always finds grace in a flower. Flowers are a symbol that life goes forward” (J. Koons, quoted in E. Geuna, “Jeff Koons Interviewed,” in Jeff Koons, exh. cat., Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Napoli, 2003, p. 157).
While his floral motifs emphasize the work’s stated themes of penetration, offering alluring orifices for the hummingbird’s beak to enter, Koons’s medium explores the theme of the eternal made explicit by the artist. Koons has elaborated how “wood is a material that churches have used a lot, therefore it is associated with spirituality. It is considered a living material” (J. Koons, quoted in ibid., p. 151). Koons had first started working with wood for Banality, the series prior to Made in Heaven, creating secular figurative sculptures which align with the baroque tradition of polychrome religious statuary. Koons had begun to explore the way the Catholic church employed art in European churches, developing a fascination for the Baroque and the Rococo while studying how religious art operated in institutional structures as a constant negotiation between object and worshiper. As the artist explains, “the church has used wood a lot to communicate to people that there’s a sense of continuation to life. It’s considered a living material, but it’s a seductive material. It has a certain sense of warmth” (J. Koons, quoted in M. Prather, op. cit., p. 196). The work operates like a religious altarpiece, aligning with what Renaissance art historian Alexander Nagel has written about Koons’s art: “Jeff Koons consecrates not just living beings but also ordinary things, and that is why when I look at his work I am always checking against the Christian relic cult” (A. Nagel, “Objects That Are Only Boundaries,” in Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, op. cit., p. 243).
Channeling the traditional usage of his medium in religious settings, Koons creates with Wall Relief with Bird a sensuous masterpiece communicating an almost spiritual sense of eternity, whilst simultaneously elaborating upon the penetrative, erotic aspects which pervade the broader Made in Heaven series. Jeff Koons is one of the most impactful artists alive today, his constantly reinventive creative world reinterprets Duchamp, Dada, Surrealism, and Pop art for the contemporary age. One of his most evocative and multifaceted works, Wall Relief with Bird insightfully provides an unvarnished look into the celebratory nature of procreation while rejoicing in the eternal.