Their presence suggested only by an ultramarine snorkel, a wanton visitor lurking beneath the bubbles shocks the subject of Woman in Tub from 1988, a masterpiece from Jeff Koons’ Banality series which crystallized the aims and interests of his mature artistic enterprise. Her mouth agape with either surprise or ecstasy, the partially decapitated figure clutches her breasts as she discovers an individual submerged between her legs, enacting a bawdy sexual joke. Among the most iconic images of not only the twenty works that comprise the Banality series but of Koons’ canonical oeuvre as a whole, Woman in Tub has been included in many of the artist’s most important exhibitions, from his 1992 survey at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam to his 2014 retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Further testament to its extraordinary importance, another edition of the present work is held in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, with other Banality works residing in prestigious international institutions, including the Museum Brandhorst, Munich; The Broad, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. Interrogating the origins of desire, the politics of spectatorship, and our collective – perhaps arbitrary – hierarchies of taste, Woman in Tub seduces its viewer into indulging their intrigue, implicating us in the very act of voyeurism the work critiques.
Woman in Tub will be sold at the Now and Contemporary Auction, presented in partnership in Samsung, on 20 November in New York.
