The Art Leaves with Us

In August 2025, Jeff Koons visited Kamberri/Canberra as the inaugural fellow for the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia (AFNGA) Visiting Creatives Program to celebrate the launch of Balloon Venus Dolni Vestonice (Yellow) 2013–17, a generous gift of Steve and Kylie Shelley through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program. The AFNGA program, which brings influential American artists to Australia to engage with the national collection and broader arts community, comprised a series of events including a sold-out in conversation with Director Nick Mitzevich.¹ Koons and his family also enjoyed an on-Country walk on Black Mountain with Ngunnawal guide Tyronne Bell and a visit to the Canberra Glassworks.

In Balloon Venus Dolni Vestonice (Yellow) on display as part of highlights of the international art collection, Koons reimagines a tiny ancient mammoth-ivory fertility figure as a mirror-polished sculpture.² Apart from scale, the most obvious difference between the source object and Koons’ sculpture is the surface treatment: the highly reflective finish incorporates the viewer and surrounds. The work is one of four Balloon Venuses each with unique colour variants – the other three are more elaborate and recall more directly their female source figures – and part of Koons’ ongoing Antiquity series in which he draws on Classical and Baroque sculpture, Meissen figurines and statuary, as well as the balloon forms for which he is best known.³ His recent (Sleeping Hermaphrodite) Gazing Balls 2025 combines a plaster version of the famous Roman sculpture in the Louvre, Paris, with reflective spheres in glass.

Encountering the collection displays in Kamberri/ Canberra, Koons remarked on the experience of entering The Aboriginal Memorial 1987–88 and the importance of sensing its history, observing: 'It’s not just the meaning of this moment in time, but it’s a meaning that we’re able to filter back through time and to be enriched through the understanding from the past to this moment.' In the next gallery, positioned between Giovanni di Paolo’s Crucifixion c 1455 and Willem de Kooning’s Woman V 1952–53, and across from the Lake Sentani double figures, Balloon Venus Dolni Vestonice (Yellow) seems quite at home in a display that brings together works from the earliest period of the National Gallery’s collecting with more recent acquisitions to suggest the continuity of artists’ ideas over time. Koons’ Balloon Venus sculptures were partially inspired by imagining hunter gatherers looking at their kill 25,000 or 30,000 years ago. The artist imagined them noticing that as the gases expanded, the intestines and stomachs inflated and he wondered if they ever thought to make something from this – an object a community could rally around.

'That’s what I’m interested in. That’s why I get up in the morning. That’s why I do the things that I do. It’s the reason I have interactions with the world, to participate in that bending of space and time… Every day my life feels more enriched because art gives me an anchor to discover the world, to have a philosophical base in my life, a theological base. I’ve always tried to use my art to help bring about self-acceptance. We all have to learn how to accept ourselves, and once we accept who we are, then we’re able to remove the fear and the anxiety to open ourselves up to the world.'

Koons described learning to draw, growing up in Pennsylvania and learning about aesthetics from his parents – his father was an interior decorator, who ran a furniture store and his mother a seamstress who kept house – and how his skills helped to develop his growing sense of self:

'We had a local newspaper and every Sunday they ran a competition: they invited local children to cut out a little black-and-white drawing and to glue it on a piece of paper and extend the drawing. I would do it every week. You had the opportunity to win a set of encyclopaedias. I never won first prize, but I did come in second and third place. In a way, I was seeking knowledge. If you think about the set of encyclopaedias, it’s like being able to have all the information in the world… To this day, my work deals with trying to communicate self-acceptance, to embrace oneself. That’s the only platform we have as individuals.'

Koons also recounted how his family loved people and how his father, from his store on Main Street in York, Pennsylvania, would 'walk down the road every day and speak to anybody he came across'. Koons senior was very supportive and exhibited the young artist’s copies of a painting by the 18th‑century French artist Jean-Baptiste Pater that fetched as much as US$1200 per work. His showroom was 'full of objects, chairs and lamps, all displaying their own identities. They got me involved in a dialogue around the readymade: objects that seemed so heightened with the attention they were able to get just by presenting themselves.'

Koons’ ongoing use of 'readymades' and his fascination with reflective surfaces evolved from bringing together inflatable objects with mirrors. He described Inflatable flower and bunny (Tall white, pink bunny) 1979 as one of the first works that excited him: every time he looked at it, the reflections seemed a little different.

'A type of metaphysics was taking place and the crispness, the excitement that I was feeling, was moving. I felt that this was really the beginning, that if I was contributing something that it was starting here.' An attraction to air, breath and inflation appears and reappears through the artist’s practice, and he likens the membrane of a balloon to skin. Balloons convey a sense of exuberance, and people feel the aspect of celebration contained by them but 'at the same time, they’re anthropomorphic… when we take a breath and we fill up, we have all this, energy, we’re balloons ourselves. And when we exhale, we become a kind of symbol of death.'

The Director shared his first experience of Koons' work, as an art student in the late 1980s, when he encountered an advertisement in the magazine Flash Art that featured a photograph of the artist staged with two pigs. For his first major exhibition Banality, shown in Cologne, New York and Chicago in 1988–89, Koons had been offered either a catalogue or advertisements for the show. Having been inspired by a portrait of David Bowie shot by celebrity photographer Greg Gorman, and having always loved being part of an art-world community that discussed what art can be, he chose the ads.

'I wanted to present myself in different ways, to different sections of the art public. Flash Art was read by a young group of artists who were very open to whatever art could be [and] I was trying to rally young artists. During the 1980s, it was quite provocative because no-one had been very forward about how you might position yourself or reach out to an audience. I wanted to debase myself, and basically call myself a pig… from that, I could only go up in people’s minds.'

Banality, which included some of his best-known works such as Michael Jackson and Bubbles 1988, and the artist’s use of irony, self-deprecation and satire, prompted much discussion. His dealer Ileana Sonnabend summed up perfectly, calling Koons 'the new zeitgeist'.

Since his iconic Rabbit 1986, the first inflatable to be translated into stainless steel form, Koons’ balloon sculptures have become larger and more complex, their technical resolution more involved.

For Balloon Venus Dolni Vestonice (Yellow), he worked with a professional balloon twister to produce a large number of maquettes. His chosen object was then scanned and enlarged, digitally sculpted to ensure the final, fabricated metal work conveys a sense of the original balloon brought to life by the act of breathing:

'I’m so happy Balloon Venus Dolni Vestonice (Yellow) is at the National Gallery in Canberra. I always enjoyed working with a metallic surface because it reflects us and affirms us. Art is within the viewer; it’s about your essence and your own potential. Anybody coming to the National Gallery, looking at Balloon Venus, is going to see this work is about them. Whatever they’re thinking about, if they’re feeling a sense of connection to memory and history, this is the art they’re experiencing – and when they leave the room, the art leaves with them.'

As Koons, his wife Justine Koons and their family came together with the Shelleys, AFNGA representatives and other supporters of the National Gallery of Australia to mark the gift of Balloon Venus Dolni Vestonice (Yellow), the Gallery acknowledged an extraordinary work by one of the most important artists of our time. Just as the maker of the original ivory Dolni Vestonice may have brought a community together, this 21st-century sculpture encourages all of us to find meanings embedded within objects.