JEFF KOONS | Christ and the Lamb

signed, dated 88 and numbered 3/3 on the reverse 

Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London (acquired from the artist)
Acquired from the above by David Teiger in 1998

New York, Sonnabend Gallery; Berlin, Galerie Max Hetzler; and Chicago, Donald Young Gallery, Banality, November 1988 - January 1989 (edition no. unknown)
New York, Museum of Biblical Art, Biblical Art in a Secular Century: Selections, 1896-1993, December 2006 - March 2007 (edition no. unknown) 
New York, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Rococo: The Continuing Curve, 1730-2008, March - July 2008, p. 233, no. 26, illustrated in colour (edition no. 2/3, Collection Groninger Museum, Groningen)
Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Jeff Koons, May - September 2008, p. 66, illustrated in colour (edition no. 1/3)
Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Jeff Koons, May - September 2012, p. 115, illustrated in colour (edition no. 1/3)
Frankfurt, Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Jeff Koons: The Painter & The Sculptor, June - September 2012, pp. 38 and 158, no. 1, illustrated in colour (edition no. 2/3, Collection Groninger Museum, Groningen)
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou; and Bilbao, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, June 2014 - September 2015, p. 113, no. 68, illustrated in colour (edition no. 3/3, Whitney, edition no. 2/3, Bilbao), and p. 78 (text)
Bremen, Kunsthalle Bremen; and Prague, Galerie Rudolfinum, Last Year in Marienbad: Film as Art, November 2015 - November 2016, p. 235, no. 95, illustrated in colour (edition no. 2/3)

Michael Brenson, 'Gallery View: Greed Plus Glitz, with a Dollop of Innocence', The New York Times, December 18, 1988, p. 42 (text)
Lawrence Chua, 'Jeff Koons', Flash Art, February 1989, p. 113, illustrated 
Anon., 'Big Fun: Four Reactions to the New Jeff Koons', Artscribe International, March/April 1989, p. 49, illustrated 
Jean-Christophe Ammann, ‘Der Fall Jeff Koons/Jeff Koons: Case Study’, Parkett, No. 19, March 1989, p. 60, illustrated 
Exh. Cat. Bologna, Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna; Rimini, Musei Comunali, AnniNovanta, Milan 1991, pp. 249, illustrated in colour
Robert Rosenblum, The Jeff Koons Handbook, London 1992, p. 111, illustrated in colour (edition no. unknown)
Angelika Muthesius, Ed., Jeff Koons, Cologne 1992, p. 110, no. 12, illustrated in colour (edition no. unknown)
Robert Rosenblum, ‘Jeff Koons’ Christ and the Lamb’, Artforum, September 1993, p. 148, illustrated in colour (edition no. unknown)
Robert Rosenblum, On Modern American Art: Selected Essays, New York 1999, p. 335, illustrated in colour
Anon., ‘Blockbuster Videos’, Harper's Bazaar, April 2000, p. 204 
Martha Schwendener, ‘Believers and Doubters, Inspired by the Word’, The New York Times, Art & Design, 6 February 2007, p. E5, illustrated in colour (edition no. 2/3, Collection Groninger Museum, Groningen)
Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed., Jeff Koons, Cologne 2009, p. 296, illustrated in colour (edition no. unknown)
Marybeth Sollins, Ed., Art:21 - Art in the Twenty First Century 5, Dalton 2009, p. 91, illustrated in colour (edition no. unknown)
Georg Seeblen, 'Blur Witch Projects', Build, March 2011, pp. 16-17.
Susan Moore, 'A Bold New Image for Antiquities', Financial Times, November 26, 2011, p. 4. 
Raphaël Bouvier, Jeff Koons - Der Künstler als Täufer, Munich 2012, p. 258, no. 31, illustrated (edition no. unknown)
Julie Champion and Caroline Edde, Jeff Koons: La Retrospective: The Album of the Exhibition, Belgium 2014, p. 28.
Julie Champion and Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov, Jeff Koons: La Retrospective: The Portfolio of the Exhibition, France 2014, p. 78.
Terry Barrett, Why is that Art? Aesthetics and Criticisms of Contemporary Art, Oxford 2017, p. 25 (text)

Distinguished by his remarkable generosity, unfailing politeness, and meticulous eye, David Teiger was one of the twenty-first century’s greatest patrons and collectors. Driven by a desire for inspiration and buttressed by meticulous research, Teiger built a collection that perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the art world from the 1990s through the 2000s. Defining excellence in a wide variety of collecting categories, Teiger insistently pursued the very best. He surrounded him-self with artists and dealers, but most importantly, museum curators, and would take advice from all quarters, relentlessly searching for the best works available, but ultimately with confidence in his own judgement.

The criteria by which Teiger collected were remarkably consistent, and were summed up in a quote he gave to The New York Times in 1998, when he first began acquiring Contempo-rary artworks. He said: “I’m looking to be inspired, motivated, titillated by art. I want to be surrounded by objects that give me positive energy...Of course I want first rate pieces. I look for authenticity, integrity, original natural surface and a strong sense of color and texture. But the most important thing is that I react in my gut” (David Teiger, quoted in: The New York Times, October 30, 1998). Years later the terminology changed but the requirements remained the same; for all his meticulous research and careful consideration of every purchase, Teiger still required that an item “have heat,” an intrinsic quality that would combine with other criteria such as ‘’best of type,” “great craft,” and “powerful presence” to qualify a work for admission to Teiger’s collection.

Amassed over the course of twenty years, the David Teiger Collection is wide ranging in its scope, comprising a spectacular array of contemporary artworks, from paintings and works on paper to photographs and prints, and one of the greatest collections of American Folk Art in private hands. Famously exacting, each purchase would necessitate an extraordinary depth of research, often including multiple studio visits. As he remarked in an interview with his friend Alanna Heiss, the then director of MoMA PS1, in 2005, “you can never get enough information,” while friends and those who worked with him spoke of his relentless pursuit of perfection.

The result of this exacting approach was that Teiger developed a remarkably discerning and prescient eye, leading him to patronize several highly influential contemporary artists at the start of their careers, including Mark Grotjahn, Kai Althoff, Chris Ofili, and Glenn Brown. This patronage would have been hugely important to them, not only financially, but also in terms of the confidence it would have given them to know that their work was going to a very astute collector. As Alanna Heiss put it to Teiger himself, “you are very respect-ed and loved by artists ... [they] love to know that they are in your collection.”

This is not to say however that Teiger’s collecting was confined to identifying artistic frontrunners. He was a great believer in the potential for the rediscovery of an artist. The depth and quality of his collection of works by John Wesley for instance, an artist who started his career alongside Tom Wesselmann and James Rosenquist without ever receiving the same degree of acclaim that his peers enjoyed, speaks to Teiger’s belief in the underlying quality of the artist, despite his comparative critical and commercial anonymity.

Another definitive aspect of Teiger’s life was the enormous generosity towards institutions. Museums were privileged to know that they could always ask to borrow pieces from the collection, and donations were consistently made to acquisition funds and curatorial initiatives, most notably to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Teiger was an honorary trustee, but also the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among others.
This preoccupation with artistic institutions was in large part owing to the immense respect that Teiger had for curators, to whom he attributed the power to narrate and de-termine the story of an artist or movement. He saw it as his duty to ensure that they had all the tools necessary to realize their aims. For instance, he was a key supporter of MoMA’s ambitious survey exhibition in 2002, Drawing Now: Eight Propositions, which stalled at a pivotal moment following the attacks on New York in September 2001. Funding had dried up and the exhibition was on the rocks until Teiger stepped in and provided funding not only for the exhibition but for an accompanying catalogue, which was the first drawing catalogue produced by the museum to go into multiple print-ings. Duly, a principle objective of Teiger Foundation, which will be the recipient of all funds generated by the sale of the collection, is to continue Teiger’s initiatives in this direction. Taken as a whole, this is a collection that encapsulates the History of Now, and serves as a testament to the immense foresight and bravery of David Teiger’s vision. 


In the Banality work, I started to be really specific about what my interests were. Everything here is a metaphor for the viewer’s cultural guilt and shame. Art can be a horrible discriminator. It can be used either to be uplifting and to give self-empowerment, or to debase people and disempower them. And on the tightrope in between, there is one’s cultural history. These images are aspects from my own, but everybody’s cultural history is perfect, it can’t be anything other than what it is – it is absolute perfection. Banality was the embracement of that.

Jeff Koons


Executed in 1988, Christ and the Lamb comes from one of Jeff Koons’s most celebrated body of works, Banality. Comprising an assortment of wood and porcelain sculpture and, as in the present work, ornately framed mirrors, Koons's Banality series represents the artist's most elaborate and dedicated response to the mechanics and dynamics of the ideas of the readymade and appropriation. The works draws from an array of sources that range from the sacred to the profane, the revered to the banal, creating a compelling interplay between so-called 'high' art and 'low' culture. In Christ and the Lamb, the large-scale, elaborately gilded frame has been manipulated so as to suggest the outline of Jesus as a young child petting a lamb. The silhouetted image has been directly borrowed from a scene in Leonardo da Vinci’s canonical oil painting The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, circa 1503, housed in the Louvre, Paris. 

In embedding such a highly recognisable image within the framework of his intricately crafted Rococo-style mirror, Koons urges his viewers to reflect – quite literally – upon the saturated commodity culture of mass-production and globalisation that had come to characterise America by the late 1980s. Indeed, Koons produced each work in the Banality grouping as an edition of three, with one artist’s proof, enabling the series to be simultaneously exhibited in 1988 in the Sonnabend Gallery, New York, the Max Hetzler Gallery in Cologne, and the Donald Young Gallery in Chicago. This was, for Koons, a new religion for a modern day audience: “When you go to church and you see the gold and the Rococo,” he explained in relation to his Banality mirrors, “it’s there, they say, for the glory of God. But I believe that it’s there just to soothe the masses for the moment; to make them feel economically secure; to let something else – a spiritual experience, a manipulation – come into their lives” (Jeff Koons cited in: Robert Rosenblum, The Jeff Koons Handbook, London 1992, p. 110).  Hovering poignantly between divinity and ostentation, opulence and kitsch, Christ and the Lamb holds a mirror, both physically and metaphorically, up to the beholder and the contemporary world, revealing them in all their contradictory glory.

Following in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, Koons’s practice is concerned with the transformation of the unremarkable or unconventional into art. Delving the viewer into a surrealistic realm in which religious iconography and popular culture collide, Koons examines the transmutable, permeable boundary between art and commodity in this ground-breaking body of work. As seemingly deadpan quotations of recognisable or commonplace artefacts, the statues and Rococo mirrors of Banality were a revelation to the art world when they were first exhibited. As journalist Adam Gopnik recorded in early 1989, “The most shocking art in America is being made by the young New Yorker Jeff Koons. His exhibition this winter at the Sonnabend Gallery shocked people who claimed not to have been shocked by anything since the early sixties, and caused a scandal of a sort that was (especially in the year of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Armory show) almost touching in its re-creation of an earlier and more embattled era in the history of modern art” (Adam Gopnik, ‘The Art World: Lost and Found’, The New Yorker, 20 February 1989, p. 107). Koons’s reputation as one of the most controversial artists of the late Twentieth Century has endured well into the present day and, whilst his art continues to divide opinion and generate debate, the influence of his practice on the history of art has been undeniably vast. With its seductive blend of beauty and banality, Christ and the Lamb becomes a celebration of belief; belief in ourselves and the possibilities of the world around us.