Enigmatic and seductive, emphatic yet elegant, Quad Elvis is a brilliant example of the virtuosic dexterity with which Jeff Koons has reimagined the art historical canon throughout his artistic career. Channeling the artist’s quintessential Pop sensibility, the present work unites a vivid assembly of found imagery into a kaleidoscopic composition that provides an endlessly engaging viewing experience for all who stand before it. Executed in 2008, Quad Elvis is part of a suite of three paintings that are brought together by their shared composition and titling device; the other paintings, Elvis and Triple Elvis, features the same Playboy model, Heather Kozar, in various numeric permutations, and reside in important private collections. As it engages in a conceptually rigorous yet playful dialogue with its artistic antecedents, Quad Elvis intertwines humor and sex, extensive referential meaning with virtuosic artistic technique, all in powerful testament to Jeff Koons’ unparalleled stature in the post-Pop era.

Quad Elvis, alongside Elvis and Triple Elvis, belongs to the Popeye series of paintings and sculptures that Koons executed between 2002 and 2013. While centered on the cartoon character Popeye, these related works do not always depict Popeye directly, and instead are more broadly unified by a shared sense of sensual vitality, nuanced references to water, and the distinctively retrospective approach that goes into their making. Evidenced by the present work, Koons brings the same exacting perfectionism to his paintings as he does to his towering aluminum and steel sculptures of the Popeye series. Yet despite its photorealist finish, Quad Elvis is in fact the product of a meticulous, time-intensive process: Koons creates these paintings first by bringing together found imagery with motifs from his oeuvre, digitally manipulating and collaging the images in Adobe Photoshop, and then meticulously transferring the final composition by hand onto canvas with exacting precision. For Koons, “The finished work…always emanates a sensuous appeal, triggering desires deeply familiar to consumerist behavior. With Koons we are dealing with seduction.” (Exh. Cat., New York, C&M Arts, Jeff Koons: Highlights of 25 Years, 2004, p. 9)

A visually and conceptually provocative masterwork, Quad Elvis sees Koons' powerfully invoking a number of his most formative influences – both those from art history and those of his own, earlier oeuvre. Foremost amongst these is the Koons' homage to his most important artistic heroes: Salvador Dalí and Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp and Dalí, despite their stylistic and conceptual differences, both used their art to render the ordinary extraordinary. So too does Koons', uniting disparate aesthetic references to celebrities, cartoon characters, paradigms of popular taste and archetypes of kitsch sentimentality, all reimagined and articulated in his signature mode. Within the present work, Koons’ choice of a lobster as his pool toy model is an evident reference to Dali’s seminal work Lobster Telephone from 1936, in which the artist fastened a rubber lobster onto the back of a rotary telephone receiver. The resulting work embodies a central tenet of Surrealism: the juxtaposition of two seemingly disparate entities to create an entirely novel object, verging on the absurd. Simultaneously, Quad Elvis offers an altered concept of the Duchampian readymade, as Koons creates an entirely novel object based on emblems or ideas drawn from the mass consciousness. Speaking while in the midst of his Popeye series, Koons revealed: “I’ve returned to the ready-made. I’ve returned to really enjoying thinking about Duchamp. The whole world seems to have opened itself up again to me, the dialogue of art.” (Exh. Cat., Versailles, Jeff Koons' Versailles, 2008, p.25)

In addition to his direct invocation of the Duchampian readymade, Koons takes on the gender-bending characteristics of Duchamp’s doctored Mona Lisa, boldly renaming the present Playboy playmate after Elvis Presley. One scholar describes, “[Koons] proves himself at once the most slavish adherent to Duchamp’s legacy and also its strongest and canniest misinterpreter. For if the Frenchman proposed that any object could be art by virtue of the artist’s declaration alone, then Koons makes it so not just by naming it as such but by investing its double with the most hard-won and exacting mimetic methodologies.” (Exh. Cat., London, Gagosian Gallery, Jeff Koons: Hulk Elvis, 2009, p. 40)

In quintessential Koonsian fashion, however, the referential and conceptual depths of Quad Elvis delve far beyond merely Surrealism. In the title of the present work, Koons’ offers sly reference to Warhol’s seminal silkscreened paintings of Elvis Presley; indeed, in her come-hither gaze and graphic seriality, there is something powerfully reminiscent of Warhol’s earlier icon of the silver screen. While Warhol echoed the same film still of Elvis across each canvas however, Koons powerfully amplifies the sexual intensity of his composition by varying the pose of his Playboy model across the canvas; it is as if she slowly removes her clothes before the viewer’s eyes. In its conceptual complexity and powerful graphic allure, Quad Elvis is the epitome of Koons' astounding ability to synthesize art historical influences with the themes that pervade his own artistic trajectory. Paying tribute to Surrealism, Dada and Pop, without ever surrendering his characteristic humor or extreme focus on technical precision, Quad Elvis creates a singular impact: we are seduced, intrigued, and challenged, all at once.

Artist

Jeff Koons