“The most shocking art in America is being made by the young New Yorker Jeff Koons. His exhibition this winter at the Sonnabend Gallery shocked people who claimed not to have been shocked by anything since the early sixties."

— Adam Gopnik for the New Yorker, 1989

Jeff Koons’ Christ and the Lamb, 1988, belongs to the artist’s Banality series, a body of art that pushed the boundaries between high culture and kitsch, the sacred and the profane. This piece, an artist’s proof from an edition of three plus one proof, carries a unique status, having never before been made publicly available. Other examples from the edition are held in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago and the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands. Executed during a period marked by intense global consumerism and a shifting cultural landscape, Christ and the Lamb embodies the signature elements that make Koons' Banality series a focal point of his career. The work features an oversized, elaborately gilded Rococo-style mirror, the frame of which has been transformed into the outline of Jesus as a child, tenderly cradling a lamb. This image is a direct appropriation from Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, circa 1503, a canonical scene housed in the Louvre, Paris. By embedding this deeply sacred image within the lush framework of Rococo ornamentation, Koons forces viewers to confront the ways in which spirituality and luxury intersect. 

Koons' mirrors, including Christ and the Lamb, take this conversation further, exploring how art can simultaneously uplift and manipulate. He creates a space where viewers are compelled to “reflect” in both the literal and metaphorical sense. The mirror’s surface, surrounded by curves and flourishes traditionally associated with European aristocratic decor, becomes a site of confrontation. The work asks us to consider how religious iconography and spiritual experiences are packaged and commodified, mirroring not only our physical selves but our cultural and spiritual values. The gilded frame, sumptuous and extravagant, contrasts with the humble innocence of the child and the lamb, deepening the layers of meaning. The conceptual underpinnings of Banality come into clearer focus through Koons' own words. In 2009, reflecting on the series, he explained: “In the Banality work, I started to be really specific about what my interests were. Everything here is a metaphor for the viewer’s cultural guilt and shame. Art can be a horrible discriminator. It can be used either to be uplifting and to give self-empowerment, or to debase people and disempower them. And on the tightrope in between, there is one’s cultural history. These images are aspects from my own, but everybody’s cultural history is perfect, it can’t be anything other than what it is—it is absolute perfection. Banality was the embracement of that.”ⁱ This insight is critical to understanding Christ and the Lamb, where Koons deliberately straddles this tightrope, oscillating between reverence and critique.

“Koons is certainly the artist who has most upset and rejuvenated my seeing and thinking in the last decade. … I have finally homed in on a mirror Koons produced in 1988, Christ and the Lamb… Flamboyant and asymmetrical, this object could make flesh crawl, should that flesh belong to an art-lover who abides by the rules of good taste.”

—Robert Rosenblum for Artforum, 1993

The use of Rococo elements, with their associations of indulgence and splendor, deepens the artist’s dialogue around the purpose of religious and economic symbols. Rococo art, known for its intricate and sumptuous aesthetics, historically adorned churches and palaces, embodying both spiritual transcendence and worldly wealth. Koons leverages this history to challenge and engage his viewers. As he once observed, “When you go to church and you see the gold and the Rococo, it’s there, they say, for the glory of God. But I believe that it’s there just to soothe the masses for the moment; to make them feel economically secure; to let something else – a spiritual experience, a manipulation – come into their lives.”ⁱⁱ This statement encapsulates the complexity of Koons’ work, which critiques the comforting illusion of opulence while acknowledging its seductive power.

“Anything that reflects has a kind of spiritual transcendence because it involves the viewer. It acknowledges your presence. Every time you move, the reflection changes; it always acknowledges you.”

—Jeff Koons

Koons' Banality series is replete with visual traps, each piece designed to attract and then disarm. Another work from the series, Ushering in Banality, 1988, appears whimsical, with cherubic children flanking a pig, yet it carries deeper references to mythology and cultural iconography. Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988, mesmerizes with its golden luster, drawing parallels to religious art that venerates the divine. These works prompt viewers to reconsider how pop culture and spirituality collide, forming a “museum of art history” that spans the mythic to the modern. In Christ and the Lamb, Koons continues this exploration of cultural and spiritual dissonance. The child Jesus and the lamb, universal symbols of innocence and redemption, are placed within a lavish, gilded frame that underscores the tension between the sacred and the commodified. The piece asks viewers to consider the fine line between spiritual reverence and material excess, and in doing so, it holds a mirror up to society. Are we engaging with the image’s purity, or are we seduced by the glittering facade? This question lies at the heart of Koons’ practice, where beauty and banality are inextricably linked. 

Within the Banality series, Christ and the Lamb resonates strongly with other mirror-based works like Wishing Well and Vase of Flowers, all of which leverage reflective surfaces to engage viewers in a deeper exploration of self-perception and cultural imagery. These mirrors are not just decorative; they are integral to Koons’ larger artistic vision of implicating the viewer within the artwork. Christ and the Lamb takes this concept further by pairing the sacred imagery of Jesus and the lamb with a mirror that distorts and reframes the environment and those who gaze into it. Koons’ broader use of highly-polished, specular surfaces—seen in his stainless-steel Statuary works of 1986, especially his towering, balloon-like Rabbit, and, more recently, in his Gazing Ball series conceived in 2013—further underscores his interest in how reflections can alter and complicate reality. These surfaces do more than mirror back an undistorted world; they warp and recontextualize what they reflect, transforming the ordinary into a meditation on cultural and personal identity. By making the reflection a part of the experience, Koons challenges traditional boundaries between art and audience. Here, the reflective dynamic adds a layer of complexity, inviting viewers to consider how their own image, bent and reshaped by the mirror, becomes an active component of the artwork’s meaning. As Robert Rosenblum insightfully noted, “Christ and the Lamb flouts familiar categories, being at once a relief sculpture and a framed picture of the room it’s in or of the spectator who confronts it.”ⁱⁱⁱ

 
ⁱ Hans Werner Holzwarth, Koons, Los Angeles, 2009, p. 252.
ⁱⁱ Jeff Koons, quoted in Robert Rosenblum, The Jeff Koons Handbook, London 1992, p. 110
ⁱⁱⁱ Robert Rosenblum, "Jeff Koons’ Christ and the Lamb," Artforum, vol. 32, no. 1, September 1993, online.