In the dynamic French city of Marseille, the works of Jeff Koons, the world-famous American artist and pope of “neo-pop”, will take over the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (Mucem). The exhibition opened on May 19th and will run until October 18,2021.
This exhibition is conceived as a dialogue between the works of the artist and the museum’s huge collection (250,000 objects, 350,000 photographs, 150,000 books, etc.). There will be 20 works by Jeff Koons vs. 200 pieces from the Mucem’s collection. Koons visited the Mucem and explored the entire collection with the curators to work together to establish a rediscovery of the collections “under the eye of an artist who deeply loves objects, their plasticity, their aesthetics and the stories they tell.”
Together they also developed an original way of displaying the pieces. As the Mucem website explains: "Jeff Koons Mucem" begins with New Hoover Convertible, New Shelton Wet / Dry 10 Gallon Doubledecker (1981), emblematic work of the series The New: a vacuum cleaner is thus exposed in a plexiglass box in front of one of the ecological units kept by the Mucem, a flagship historical museographic device of the former museum of popular arts and traditions. The route ends with the monumental Bluebird Planter (2010-2016) from the Antiquity series, a stainless steel piece whose mirror polish and translucent colored coating give the illusion that the work was produced by inflating a small porcelain object. The work dialogues with a series of objects in the shape of birds, such as bird calls, finials and other small decorative pieces."
