Jeff Koons: Hulk Elvis

Accompanying the 2007 Gagosian's exhibition, Jeff Koons: Hulk Elvis surveys the latest masterpieces from one of the 21st-century's most celebrated and powerful artists. In this fascinating and beatuifully produced book, Koons' personal interpretations of his creations are explained as he delves into the meanings behind these paintings, which are simultaneously complicated, volatile, intense and brilliant. From the outset of his controversial career, Jeff Koons has turned the traditional notion of the work of art and its context insideout. Choosing surprising yet banal objects as models for his work, he shuns traditional standards of 'good taste,' instead embracing what he perceives as conventional middle-class values to underscore the vulnerabilities of artistic hierarchies and value systems. Foremost, Koons seeks to render art beautiful, to strive for objectivity, to give back the familiar, and to reflect--and thus empower--the viewer. The works of Koons' new series Hulk Elvis blaze with energy yet mystify with their complex depictions of figurative and abstract elements. A charged fusion of inflatable monkeys, geishas, birds, The Incredible Hulk, and The Liberty Bell jostleagainst realistic landscapes, gestural paintings, negative silhouettes, and underlying dot screens. According to Koons, Hulk Elvis symbolizes "both Western and Eastern culture, a sense of a guardian, a protector, that at the same time is capable of bringing the house down." Indeed, this paradoxical message is conveyed with a chaotic exuberance ofimage and texture that still maintains an uncanny level of precision and smooth detail. In these spectacular works of art, brightly colored silhouettes slice through multiple layers, contours of images surface rhythmically across the field of vision, and forms loom and recede in a swirling delirium of color and line.