Exhibit of the week: Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball and New Paintings and Sculpture

New York City

Through June 29

“The new millennium, so far, has belonged to Jeff Koons,” said Ben Davis in ArtInfo.com. As unlikely as it seemed when financial markets crashed four-plus years ago, the market for “mindless rich-guy spectacle” has barely waned, and the artist best known for his enormous stainless-steel replicas of balloon animals keeps finding buyers. Now, as we enter a veritable “year of Koons” that will culminate with a 2014 retrospective at the Whitney, the 58-year-old York, Pa., native has managed to mount simultaneous exhibitions in two major New York galleries. While each of the shows “offers a semblance of a fresh formula,” even Koons’s big new sculpture series, “Gazing Ball,” colors within familiar lines. A collection of white-plaster figures that each is affixed with a blue, reflective orb, the series is “evidently intended as an extended riff on types of lawn decoration.” It amuses, and that’s all.

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A visit to both shows underscores “how up and down” Koons’s work can be, said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. The Gagosian Gallery, in West Chelsea, pairs three huge new balloon animals with some “flat, lifeless photo-realist” paintings, plus “a motley assortment” of other sculptures. Easily the worst is “a pathetically awkward” bronze sculpture of the Incredible Hulk pushing a wheelbarrow of fresh flowers. Yet not far away stands a large magenta balloon sculpture, based on the 25,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf, that “works both as a quasi-abstract form and, as it comes into focus, a female figure.” This shiny 9-foot-tall Venus plays to the same “mine’s bigger mentality” that makes so many of Koons’s tricks almost infantile, but it’s more than mere gag.

Koons at his best appeals more to our eyes than to our brains, said Jerry Saltz in New York magazine. I had little use for the Gagosian show, but “something freakish happened” when I spent a bit of time amid the lawn furnishings at the nearby David Zwirner Gallery. The white plaster of each cast—whether a copy of a statue from antiquity or a re-creation of a row of mailboxes—was absorbing so much light that it “snowblinded me,” causing the white objects to fade from view and leaving the blue spheres “hovering in some new no-space, like disembodied seeing-eyes or planetoids.” Smirk all you want at the “blue ball” innuendo of the series. Even if the work says nothing else to you, it proves that Koons “still has real phenomenological magic up his sleeve.” Sometimes that’s enough.