In the summer of 2012, the SCHIRN and the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung turn their attention to the work of American artist Jeff Koons (born in 1955), an artist who has been setting trends in the art world since the 1980s. The two simultaneous exhibitions dedicated to Koons’s oeuvre deliberately separate his sculpture and painting, presenting each in its own context. The SCHIRN presentation JEFF KOONS. THE PAINTER will focus on Koons’s structural development as a painter. In his monumental paintings—whose motifs draw upon the most varied sources of high and popular culture—both hyperrealistic and gestural features give rise to highly complex concentrations of image and content. By contrast, in the exhibition JEFF KOONS. THE SCULPTOR at the Liebieghaus, both world-renowned and new sculptural works by Koons will enter into a dialogue with the historic building and its collection spanning 5,000 years of sculpture.
 
Curators: Vinzenz Brinkmann (Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung), Matthias Ulrich (Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt), and Joachim Pissarro (New York)

In the summer of 2012, the SCHIRN and the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung turn their attention to the work of American artist Jeff Koons (born in 1955), an artist who has been setting trends in the art world since the 1980s. The two simultaneous exhibitions dedicated to Koons’s oeuvre deliberately separate his sculpture and painting, presenting each in its own context. The SCHIRN presentation JEFF KOONS. THE PAINTER will focus on Koons’s structural development as a painter. In his monumental paintings—whose motifs draw upon the most varied sources of high and popular culture—both hyperrealistic and gestural features give rise to highly complex concentrations of image and content. By contrast, in the exhibition JEFF KOONS. THE SCULPTOR at the Liebieghaus, both world-renowned and new sculptural works by Koons will enter into a dialogue with the historic building and its collection spanning 5,000 years of sculpture.
 
Curators: Vinzenz Brinkmann (Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung), Matthias Ulrich (Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt), and Joachim Pissarro (New York)

From February 17th 2012, la maison rouge will stage the first major international exhibition of neon art from the 1940s to the present day. Some one hundred works will be presented in all, many of historical significance, many being shown for the first time. They will include pieces by such pioneers as Lucio Fontana from the early 1950s, François Morellet, Bruce Nauman, Stephen Antonakos, Joseph Kosuth and Mario Merz from the 1960s, and some of the many contemporary artists working in this medium, such as Jason Rhoades, Sylvie Fleury and Claude Lévêque.

On the right-hand side of Mendeleev’s periodic table are the so-called ‘noble’ gases, a group of chemical elements with common properties: under standard conditions, they are all odorless and colorless, but under pressure these mono-atomic gases produce a coloured light when an
electric current is passed through them. Neon (Ne), from neos, the Greek word for new, emits ared light. Argon (Ar) produces a blue light, while the light from sodium vapor is yellow.

French physicist and chemist Georges Claude developed the first neon tube in 1912, exactly one century ago. He unveiled his invention publicly at the Paris World Fair. A few years later, Claude filed a patent in the United States and, in 1923, sold his first two neon signs - reading ‘Packard’ – to a car dealership. The rest is history…

From April 10th 2011 Punta della Dogana will show In Praise of Doubt, curated by Caroline Bourgeois, a presentation of historical pieces and new works including several site-specific projects that question the idea of uncertainty, our convictions about identity, and revisit the relationship between intimate space and the space of artwork.

Among the twenty artists in the exhibition In Praise of Doubt, almost half of them have never been included in previous exhibitions of the François Pinault Collection.

At Punta della Dogana, Koons presents five works from the “Popeye” series (2002), featuring the artistic imagery which since the eighties has distinguished his Pop and at times hyperrealistic style: inflatable toys of the kind used by kids in paddling pools (which apart from being playthings can actually save a life!) are suspended from chains or supported by wire mesh. The dog, turtles, centipede, dolphin and life jacket are actually heavy full-scale reproductions in meticulously painted stainless steel. Freed from the bondage of logic or good taste and transformed into symbols of the conventional values of middle-America, they reveal the vulnerability of the established art hierarchies.

Hanging Heart (Red/Gold), 1994-2006, is a huge red heart 3 meters high and weighing one and a half tons, hung by a giant golden ribbon to the end of the Punta della Dogana. Innocent and seductive at the same time, it is suspended eighteen inches from the ground, set at the viewer’s eye level. Observing it, we feel as if drawn into its surface, entering a fantastic world populated by outsize objects that are also irresistibly sensuous.