The artist’s first major retrospective in New York organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art
2014 – 2015
Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, which presented almost 150 works from 1978-2014 at the Whitney Museum of American Art,was the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the artist's groundbreaking practice, and his first major museum survey in New York. The exhibition was also the largest ever devoted to a single artist at the Whitney, and the final show to be held at the museum's historic Madison Avenue location prior to its move to the Meatpacking District in 2015. Organized by Scott Rothkopf, Curator and Associate Director of Programs at the Whitney Museum, the exhibition traveled to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 2014-2015.
By reconstituting all of Koons's most iconic works and significant series in a chronological narrative, the retrospective allowed visitors to understand his remarkably diverse output as a multifaceted whole. "He's a marvelous artist," said Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker, "a master with formidable aesthetic intelligence and a very great deal of nerve." Writing in The New York Times, Roberta Smith described the exhibition as "lucid, challenging, [and] brilliantly installed."
A fully illustrated publication accompanying the exhibition includes texts by Scott Rothkopf, Antonio Damasio, Jeffrey Deitch, Isabelle Graw, Achim Hochdörfer, Michelle Kuo, Rachel Kushner, Pamela M. Lee, Alexander Nagel, and James Surowiecki. Also included are preparatory sketches and plans for selected works, as well as installation photographs that shed light on the artist's process and development. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art