Jeff Koons

In his Gazing Ball series from 2017, Jeff Koons pairs masterworks from art history with a mirrored, cobalt blue gazing ball, making tangible the transcendental exchange that occurs between artwork and viewer.

In conceiving the Gazing Ball print series, Koons imagined the prints’ reflective element as being perfectly flat and almost imperceptibly thin. To meet these criteria, he collaborated with the research lab at Corning, a 166-year-old company with unparalleled expertise in glass science and optical physics. The result, produced by the Corning Specialty Glass Plant in Bagneaux sur Loing, France, is a custom-poured, optically perfect, one-millimeter thick circle of mirrored cobalt blue glass.

The cobalt orbs serve a hypnotic purpose as they reflect the onlookers’ physicality, superimposing the present-day onto art historical icons. According to Koons, the gazing balls are “devices of connecting. I want to participate, I always just wanted to be involved in a dialogue with the avant garde. This is my family, these are the artists that I have interest in, the joy that has enriched my life.” This juxtaposition of past and present guides the viewer into these masterpieces, all while making the viewer’s own role in engaging in and experiencing them unavoidable.  

Koons’s intervention thus invites a dialogue about the meaning of time and how we can transcend it. “This experience is about you,” says Koons, “your desires, your interests, your participation, your relationship with this image.” In the Gazing Ball series, the act of viewing these pieces is as essential to understanding them as their own objective histories.