The God-centered prayers of beloved pastor and author John MacArthur are profound and moving. They inspire believers to come to the Father--the Lord God Almighty--with their praises, thanksgiving, and requests. Dennis Frates's stunning landscape photography is a beautiful testimony to this same God, the God of all creation. In picture and words, the reader is drawn into the full worship experience. Whether given, received, or purchased for personal use, this select collection of Scripture readings and heartfelt prayers encourage the reader to approach God's throne of grace...and receive His blessing.
Hailed by Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker as “the most original, controversial, and expensive American artist of the past three and a half decades,” Jeff Koons has come to reign as a master of the market, a wry puppeteer with a “formidable aesthetic intelligence.” His elaborate, exquisitely produced sculptures draw from a contemporary lexicon of consumerism—often featuring large-scale reproductions of toys, household items, or luxury goods—while simultaneously holding up a mirror to the very culture from which they are extracted. These references to popular media are evidenced not merely in his choice of subject matter but also in his visual techniques: his sculptures frequently comprise smooth, mirrored surfaces, and his paintings employ bright and saturated colors. Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball—the first catalogue on the artist’s work to be published by David Zwirner—was produced on the occasion of the major 2013 exhibition at the gallery in New York, which marked the world debut of his Gazing Ball series, a brand new body of work that occupies an important place in the trajectory of his practice. Conceptually derived from the mirrored ornaments encountered on many suburban lawns, including those of Koons’s childhood hometown in rural Pennsylvania, every sculpture is anchored by a blue “gazing ball” of hand-blown glass. These are situated atop large, white-plaster sculptures that have been alternately modeled after iconic works from the Greco-Roman era, including the Farnese Hercules and the Esquiline Venus, or after such quotidian objects from the contemporary residential landscape as a rustic mailbox, a birdbath, and an inflatable garden snowman. Created in close collaboration with Koons, this elegant publication echoes the classic design of a 1970 Picasso catalogue that the artist admires. Inside, vivid color plates of the sculptures in situ capture the stark contrast between the pristine whiteness of the plaster and the highly reflective spheres. In their perfect contours and smooth, glistening surfaces, the gazing balls implicate audience as well as context—mirroring both and offering playful yet powerful meditations on the dialogue between gaze and reflection. “While all of the sculptures are grounded in their own distinct narratives, derived from Art History and suburban towns,” writes Francesco Bonami in his catalogue essay, “the seemingly fragile and delicate gazing ball establishes that sense of uncertain equilibrium that exists between history and fantasy, magic and materiality, mass culture and exclusive beauty.”
With over 200 illustrations of iconic works as well as preparatory studies and historic photographs, this book offers fresh insight into Koons’s polarizing and influential career.
A catalog documenting an exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, New York, in 2013. It includes several bodies of recent work, including Antiquity paintings, Venus sculptures, and work from the renowned Hulk Elvis and Celebration series, the latter of which Koons has been working on for twenty years. With sources as diverse as children’s art, comic-book characters, and figures from classical antiquity, Koons continues to draw a common thread through cultural history, creating works that attempt to touch the core of the human psyche. Working through conceptual constructs including the new, the banal, and the sublime, he has taken his work from its literal, deadpan beginnings in ready-mades to baroque creations that extol innocence, beauty, sexuality, and happiness in confounding combinations of abstraction, figuration, sumptuous effect, and pure spectacle.In the newest series of work, the Antiquity (2009–13) series, the paintings pulse with complex layerings of image, reference, and chromatic nuance as Koons explores the historical oscillation of form in painting and sculpture. Two outsized Venus sculptures in mirror-polished stainless steel are the first sculptures to be completed in this series; one is Koons’ interpretation of one of the world’s earliest known sculptures, the Venus of Willendorf. The book includes 39 full-color plates, as well as installation photos and a fully illustrated index.
Edited by curator Masimilliano Gioni, this book focuses in particular on Koons' art as seen in relation to contemporary American culture. With his aesthetics of plenitude and his pop-up dreams of social mobility and acceptance, throughout his career Koons has composed a "fantasy America [...] custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions" -to use Warhol's description of his own interpretation of American culture. Through the inclusion of source materials, personal recollections and biographical narratives, the book reads each of Koons' celebrated series through the prism of his biography and the ways in which his individual history intersects with that of his country and culture. Ranging from his upbringing in rural Pennsylvania to his fascination for popular culture and vernacular art, the publication composes an unconventional view of Jeff Koons and his work, retracing the personal influences and cultural histories that have shaped Koons's unique formal vocabulary. Published to accompany the major exhibition in Doha in March 2021, the catalogue features an interview with Jeff Koons by the curator, and essays by the well-known art critic Dodie Kazanjian and the Qatari-American writer and artist Sophia Al Maria.
"In Jeff Koons's One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985), a Spalding basketball floats in the centre of a glass tank that rests on a simple black metal stand. The work presents what Koons called 'the penultimate state of being' - neither death nor life, but a suspended state of rest. It has been called one of the defining works of the 1980s, but was also described as 'an endgame', 'misleading' and part of a 'repulsive' practice"--Jacket.
This exhaustive monograph begins with a biographical essay of artist Jeff Koons that puts his work into context. Arranged in chronological chapters, detailed analyses are featured alongside hundreds of large-format images tracing Koons's career from 1979 to today. Limited to 1,500 copies.
