Everythings Here

Jeff Koons, the subject of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago’s featured summer exhibition, was greatly inspired and influenced by Chicago artists. Everything’s Here: Jeff Koons and his experience of Chicago serves as a companion to the Koons exhibition and presents a glimpse into the back-story of one of the most well known and intriguing artists of the 20th century. Works by artists drawn primarily from the MCA Collection that influenced Koons during his formative years as a young artist in Chicago are on view June 14 to October 26, 2008.

Chicago served as the setting for Koons’s significant artistic development. He encountered the work of Jim Nutt in the MCA-organized 1974 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York upon which he was greatly impressed and challenged to explore new paths for his own work. Koons attended the School of the Art Institute (SAIC) in 1975 - 76 on a student mobility program at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, where he received his BFA. He also was an art handler and preparator at the MCA during his studies at SAIC.

Koons was also richly inspired by the work of his mentor Ed Paschke, who is often considered the most prominent of the generation of Chicago-based artists who are collectively known as the Chicago Imagists. Koons served as a studio assistant to Paschke, whose works are represented in depth in Everything’s Here with paintings from the 1970s. Koons’s relationship to Paschke is also reflected in the exhibition’s title. In Paschke’s 2005 eulogy Koons said, “Ed taught me that everything’s here, and you just have to look for it, that it’s just here. This is the most generous thing that I think that someone can give, that, ‘it’s just here,’ you just open your eyes and all these metaphysical connections can occur.”

H.C. Westermann was also an inspirational figure for Koons, so much so that his woodblock print The Dance of Death is featured in Koons’ Elvis, a painting from 2003 that is on view in the Jeff Koons exhibition. The original woodblock from Westermann’s The Connecticut Ballroom suite is also featured, along with several sculptures, including Death Ship of No Port, 1957.

Other featured artists, all part of the Chicago Imagists community, include Roger Brown, Robert Lostutter, Karl Wirsum, and Christina Ramberg. Many of these works are from the 1970s when the Imagists first captured widespread public attention. Everything’s Here is organized by MCA Curator Lynne Warren.

Everything's Here:
Jeff Koons and his experience of Chicago

Kurator: Lynne Warren