Opening of the exhibition “Jeff Koons, the retrospective”

Event alert! Starting today, the Centre Pompidou presents the first complete retrospective dedicated to Jeff Koons in Europe. An unprecedented exhibition that takes the full measure of a work that has marked the contemporary artistic and cultural landscape for thirty-five years.

If the American artist has already been the subject of numerous exhibitions, sometimes presenting precise sets of his work, sometimes specific sculptures in given historical environments, no exhibition has gathered his work in an exhaustive and chronological course, covering the entirety of his production. And that is the whole point: some one hundred sculptures and paintings make up this retrospective which follows all the milestones of the artist’s career, thus highlighting all the strength and complexity of his work which, when partially appreciated, may leave some doubt.

Conceived in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art, which presented it in New York from 27 June to 19 October 2014, the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou invites visitors to take a look, free of prejudice, at the work of one of the most famous and controversial artists of our time, whom Bernard Blistène, director of the Musée national d’art moderne and curator of the Paris exhibition, considers to be one of the most famous and controversial artists of our time.

From his first’Inflatables’ series of colourful inflatable toys, to his latest magnificent production, entitled’Gazing ball’, via the’Balloon Dog’,’Michael Jackson and Bubbles’, or the less known but just as brilliant series”Pre-New” invoking the work of Dan Flavin with great strokes of neons and columns of vacuum cleaners, this ultra-exhaustive retrospective is a real anti-morosity remedy. Good thing it’s winter.

Jeff Koons, the retrospective
Until 27 April 2015
at the Centre Pompidou