Gazing Ball by Jeff Koons on display at the Gallerie d’Italia in Milan awaiting the monographic of Palazzo Strozzi
Jeff Koons is back in great shape in Italy with a widespread exhibition project, stopping first at Galleries of Italy of Milan and then to Strozzi Palace from Florence. This morning, in fact, the work was presented to the press Gazing Ball (Centaur and Lapith Maiden), exhibited inside the museum of Intesa Sanpaolo in Piazza Scala and accessible to the public until November 7, 2021.
The work, created in 2013 and now part of a private collection, belongs to the series “Gazing Balls”, a singular cycle of works in which Koons replicates sculptural groups of antiquity and then rests on them blue blown glass spheres, typical decorations of provincial American gardens. In the case of Centaur and Lapith Maiden, the mirror sphere, which literally translated from English “observe ” the viewer, is placed on a plaster cast over two meters high and depicting the struggle between a centaur and a Lapita woman, in turn obtained from a nineteenth-century cast of a part of the western pediment of the Temple of Zeus in Olympia.
Its presentation today in Milan aims to create an invisible bridge with Florence in sight of “Jeff Koons. Shine”, the great and highly anticipated exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi which will open its doors on October 2nd and which has been introduced to professionals as one of the largest exhibitions in Europe dedicated to the artist.
“I believe this is a significant testimony of how useful it is to create a concrete and operational network of cultural institutions that mutually help each other”, commented this morning Michele Coppola, Executive Director of Art, Culture and Historical Heritage of Intesa Sanpaolo, referring to the Florentine exhibition of which the bank is the main partner. “They help each other in dialogue with artists, with other cultural institutions and with collectors. And it is nice to see stages and places, such as the Gallerie d’Italia in this case, becoming a common factor to facilitate extraordinary, exceptional and unique initiatives such as that of Palazzo Strozzi ”.
“Having this work by Jeff Koons on loan here in Milan is not something to be taken for granted. It is a very important work that in fact few have seen, especially in Italy “, has explained Arturo Galansino, General Director of the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation. “Now we are going to meet one of the most important monographs that have ever been presented in Europe on this artist, which will bring to Florence forty years of his career focusing on the theme of ‘shine’, or rather on ‘reflectance’ and on the concepts of appearance and essence”.