Jeff Koons

Sonnabend Gallery, New York
Private Collection, New York
Sotheby's New York, November 19, 1997, Lot 40
Private Collection, Columbus
Acquired by the present owner circa 2000

Venice, Aperto: Venice Biennale, May - September 1990
Bielefeld, Kunsthaus Bielefeld, Jeff Koons: Pictures 1980 - 2002, September - November 2002, p. 61, illustrated in color
Oslo, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art; Helsinki, Helsinki City Art Museum, Jeff Koons: Retrospective, September 2004 - April 2005, pp. 94 - 95, illustrated in color
London, Barbican, Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now, October 2007 - January 2008

Anthony d'Offay, ed., The Jeff Koons Handbook, New York, 1992, p. 162 (text reference)
Angelika Muthesius, ed., Jeff Koons, Cologne, 1992, pl. 4, p. 128, illustrated in color and p. 131, illustrated in color (exhibition photograph from 1990 Venice Biennale)
Exh. Cat., San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (and travelling), Jeff Koons, 1992, cat. no. 51, pl. 62, illustrated in color (edition AP)
Camilla Long, "Loony Koons", Tatler, vol. 3, no. 5, May 2007, pp. 11 and 116-122
Philip Utz, "Catching up with Jeff Koons", Numero 6, September 2007, pp. 64-69, illustrated
Gunnar B. Kvaran, Jeff Koons: Retrospettivamente, Milan, 2007, p. 62, illustrated
Hans Werner Holzwarth, Jeff Koons, Cologne, 2007, pp. 344-345, illustrated in color
Craig Raine, "Looney Koons", Evening Standard, June 4, 2009, pp. 26-27, illustrated in color
Johnathan Jones, "Not just the king of kitsch", The Guardian, June 30, 2009, pp. 6-7, illustrated in color
Ossian Ward, "Hello Sailor!", Time Out London, July 2, 2009, p. 22, illustrated in color
Charlotte Bonham-Carter and David Hodge, The Contemporary Art Book, London, 2009, p. 134, illustrated in color

This work is in excellent condition overall. There is very fine cracking along the folds at the outer edges as to be expected of the medium. Under ultraviolet light there are no apparent restorations. The canvas is unframed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Jeff Koons' Made in Heaven series makes a stand for the artist's wit and timeliness. When first shown at the Venice Biennale in 1990, the series captured the public's imagination to the extent that Koons' solo show staged at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York in November 1991 had lines around the block. Made in Heaven is an expansive, unabashed body of work in which Koons celebrated, in blatantly sexual terms, his union with Ilona Staller (the couple were married), the Italian porn star known as Cicciolina. It can be said that Koons' entire career explores human desires and issues of pleasure and transcendence, so touching upon the erotic is a natural and ultimate evolution. The present work, Ilona on Top (Rosa Background) is a central work from this important series that uniquely and truly represents the aestheticization of contemporary desire.

In 1989, Jeff Koons' unveiled a billboard in several locations in New York City for the Whitney Museum's Image World exhibition.  The large image conceptually advertises a film entitled "Made in Heaven" starring the famous young artist and the infamous Italian porn star, Cicciolina. The artist is naked; the porn star is dressed in lacy white underwear. They lie together on a large bronze rock-like form, a commercially illustrated mural swoops into the composition whirling around them. The image is part Harlequin Romance novel and pure post-modern irony at its best. It recalls many canonized images stored in our collective pop-culture memory bank; yet, it is strikingly different and it appears in a different context from those things to which it refers.  The billboard teases. It reveals very little about the meaning or content of the mysterious project it serves to illustrate and promote, Made in Heaven, and it ultimately leaves its viewer with more questions than answers. In 1991, Jeff Koons' Made in Heaven exhibition opened simultaneously in New York and Cologne, and the expectations were incredibly high for the seemingly unstoppable artist. His previous show, Banality, had been the most critically and commercially successful one to date, and it had been three years since Koons had a solo show in a commercial gallery. The billboard, along with a sampling of works from the Made in Heaven series shown at the Venice Biennale in 1990, had left people wanting more. In his most daring and self implicating move yet, Koons delivered his most controversial body of work on the surface while simultaneously creating one of his most profound, sociological bodies of work.

Made in Heaven presented an ambitious and highly varied number of new works in two and three dimensions. Starring Koons and La Cicciolina as promised in the billboard, large photographically produced paintings such as Ilona on Top (Rosa Background) and life-size sculptures showed the stars engaged in various sexual positions. The blatant sexual content of these paintings and sculptures were accompanied by the theological and art historical. A total of 29 paintings were completed in this series.

Ilona on Top (Rosa Background) is one of the six large-scale works that Koons completed in the Made in Heaven series, all measuring 8 by 12 feet. In the present work, the couple is staged in an indoor set. Cicciolina gazes at Koons who in turn looks out at the viewer in a style typical of pornographic images, inviting the viewer into the image. Koons was drawn to the fantasy element in the pictures of Ilona Staller and was interested in the sexual imagery as staged in Eastern European pornographic conventions (Staller was Hungarian by birth) in these large scale paintings, resulting in the fantasy setting with a dominant pink palette and the larger-than-life butterflies encircling the couple. Koons stereotyped elements of overly elaborate decoration and fused classicism and pop with a sense of ecstasy in this carefully staged modern Garden of Eden as he celebrates his union with Cicciolina. This union can be viewed as a dialogue with the eternal, both ephemeral and biological.

With the Made in Heaven, Koons was also interested in continuing a dialogue with art history. These paintings  make reference to 19th century works like Courbet and Manet.  Koons directly cites Masaccio's Expulsion in the Garden of Eden as a continuation of his interest in the removal of guilt and shame. Koons is also referencing the artists from the Baroque and Rococo period such as Fragonard and Boucher.  In the 18^th and 19^th century, the genre of love scenes only made subtle and conventional allusions to sex. In the paintings from the Made in Heaven series, there is no allusion. Koons carefully stages the figures in the foreground of the large-scale canvases so that they will command the attention of the viewer and distort our perception of the sexual act. Koons provides distance for the viewer only through scale. Although the content could not be more different, there is a Minimalist relationship of proportions between the viewer and the object at play in Ilona on Top (Rosa Background) and the other paintings from this series. The viewer's awareness of their presence in relation to the art is heightened. The paintings, in particular, from Made in Heaven may at times be seen as graphic, but to only  view them as pornography is to miss the poetic side to the work, which communicates the acceptance of the human body, the beauty and the eternal of the biological.  Koons was also criticized for blatant self-promotion with the use of his own image in these works. He flirted with the aspect of his own image in the Art Magazine ads and in Made in Heaven becomes the subject. These works can truly be considered self portraits, but to look at the works in only this way is to miss the point that Koons also saw he and Ilona as a reference to every man and every woman.

Ilona on Top (Rosa Background) is a magnificent example from arguably Koons' most important and controversial series. Made in Heaven comfortably situates itself, as to be expected from the artist, on the border between high and low, a tribute at once to kitsch and to Baroque and Rococo decorative motifs while also being overtly confrontational sexual, profound and philosophical. Koons commented on his intentions in an interview with Anthony Haden-Guest, "I don't think people at this time understand that exhibition yet. It wasn't about sex or pornography. What I tried to do is use myself as an example and go to the depths of hypocrisy and come back up – to resurface without making any direct moral judgments. The art-world uses taste as a form of segregation. I was trying to make a body of work that anybody could enjoy. It showed beauty in simple things, so that people can embrace their own pasts.'' (Angelika Muthesius, ed., Jeff Koons , Cologne, 1992, p. 30)