The colourful symbolism of Paul Gauguin’s Delightful Land (Te Nave Nave Fenua) radiates out of Jeff Koons’ Gazing Ball reworking of the 19th century master. Part of the artists wider Gazing Ball series, in which Koons engages in dialogue with the heavyweights of art history, in Gauguin Delightful Land Koons disrupts the Tahitian figure in her landscape by adding a perfectly flat and imperceptibly thin reflective blue glass ball to the printed surface.
Koons collaborated with the research lab at Corning, a 166-year-old company with expertise in glass science and optical physics, to develop and hone the reflective ‘ball’. The result is a custom-poured, optically perfect, one-millimetre-thick circle of mirrored cobalt blue glass.
When standing in front of these Gazing Ball works, the viewer is reflected, immediately raising questions about the relationship between artworks and their interpreters in the most tangible way. “This experience is about you,” says Koons, “your desires, your interests, your participation, your relationship with this image.” The viewer becomes a part of the artwork, captured for a brief moment in blue reflection and in that instant sharing a part of the object’s history.
Jeff Koons’ works are held in the collections of The Broad, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
